Coming home
Jon Voight finds himself back in Yonkers with ‘Ray Donovan’ filming in New York for the new season
AFTER five seasons in Los Angeles, where the Buggy Whip restaurant and Glen Capri motel were part of the seedy backdrop of “Ray Donovan,” executive producer David Hollander moved the show to New York. For its sixth season, premiering Sunday on Showtime, the drama was shot at Cine Magic East River studios in Greenpoint and other NY locations, including Staten Island and Yonkers.
For Jon Voight — who plays wily, felonious patriarch Mickey Donovan, who in the new season devises a brilliant if medically illadvised way to get out of prison — it was like coming home: He was born in Yonkers.
One day on location, the 79-year-old actor realized his childhood home was nearby.
“It was seven minutes away,” he told The Post the other day, as he drove his Lexus through Beverly Hills.
A driver for the show took Voight to his old home at 60 Ball Ave. Fifteen years had passed since he had last seen it.
“There were enormous changes,” he says. “There used to be a row of trees right across from our house and a field that dropped down to the Saw Mill River Parkway.” As the parkway expanded, the field went by the wayside. “I suddenly realized how hilly it is [there],” he says. “Yonkers,” Voight claims, “means ‘hills’ in German. It was so amazing. I came from this hill country. As a kid, you live within the four blocks that you live on.”
Voight lived there with his parents Barbara and Elmer and his brothers, Barry, a former volcanologist, and James Wesley, who, under the name Chip Taylor, wrote the songs “Wild Thing” and “Angel of the Morning.” His father, a pro golfer, gave lessons at the Sunningdale Country Club in Scarsdale and told stories to his sons at night, some about his own life, others that he made up.
“You really felt you were there,” Voight says of his dad’s fictional spy tales. “Derring-do and all of that stuff. We were probably the first people in Yonkers who knew what the word ‘espionage’ meant. I became enamored of telling stories.”
When “Ray” was filming in Los Angeles, the set was a 20minute drive from Voight’s modest Beverly Hills home. For the East Coast shoot, Voight rented an apartment on the waterfront in Williamsburg, which he remembered as a really rough neigh- borhood when he lived in New York in the ’70s. What a difference a few decades of gentrification makes.
“Now it’s become trendy and very charming,” he says. “There are a lot of young people, a lot of babies and a lot of dogs. I love babies and little kids. Every time I see a little child, I laugh. I know how much the mother is doing, pushing the stroller.”
Voight says he walked everywhere. “I really got used to it,” he says. “Made many friends along the way. The shops all knew me. It was fun. Now I’m feeling an affection for Brooklyn.”
Voight’s role on “Ray Donovan” — one of the juiciest in a career that includes an Oscar win for 1978’s “Coming Home” — earned him two Emmy nominations and a 2014 Golden Globe for best supporting actor in a drama series.
“The more trouble he gets into, the better it is for me,” he says of Mickey. “When I look at careers of the great artists I grew up watching and the artists who are my peers, I know a little something about why a career sustains and . . . mine has sustained because of my flexibility and my ability to find new challenges.”
While he was in New York, Voight missed his West Coast friends and family: son James Haven, daughter Angelina Jolie and his six grandchildren. “She doesn’t like me to talk too much about the kids with the nonsense that’s going on,” he says of the Brangelina breakup, “but everything is good.”
His trip home left an indelible impression. “I really liked Yonkers,” he says. “It has people who work hard and do the best they can with their families. They talk straight and they’re good-hearted. I liked being back there.”