‘Chicago P.D.’s Jason Beghe says fate has always navigated his life
Jason Beghe was 50 years old before he realized he was a professional actor. The man who plays Hank Voight, the tough cop in charge of Chicago’s Intelligence Unit, in NBC’s “Chicago P.D.” thinks life just pushed him in that direction.
“I’d been working my whole life as an actor, and I just always thought, ‘What am I going to do when I grow up?’ And then I finally realized, ‘I am an actor’ because I never quite knew the point of it. I didn’t really have much direction or vision about it,” he says.
“It gave me something to do, and I enjoyed it. I wasn’t embarrassing myself. I liked the free time. Unlike most other actors, they kind of work, and the job’s over, and they fall into a tailspin because they think, ‘I’ll never work again!’ For me, I’m like, ‘Oh, I have money in the bank. I’m sure something will come along.’ And it always did.”
He says fate always navigated his life. He didn’t intend to travel to Europe in his 20s to become a model, he says. But he was bored with college and says he probably suffered from attention deficit disorder. He was surprised when his modeling endeavor took flight. People kept telling Beghe he should be an actor, so he figured he’d try it and enrolled in drama school.
“I was 23, 24 when I left Europe and did OK in the class and everybody was professional, and I asked them if I could meet their agents. And I signed with an agent and started working,” he says.
It was turmoil in his private life that finally propelled his professional life. “I was in a lawsuit
with the Church of Scientology, and they were trying to destroy me,” he says. “… And one day my wife at the time said, ‘Hey, you know we’re almost out of money,’ which I hadn’t experienced since I was maybe 20 or something.
“So, I thought, ‘I’ve got a family now and a mortgage and blah, blah, blah.’ And I had to focus on responsibilities and money and all this kind of stuff, and what am I going to do here? That made me start working with a little more focus. And there it was.”
He figured a TV series might serve him well. “Even then I was thinking my ideal thing would be to be No. 8 on the call-sheet, and I’d work two days a week. If you really set your mind to something, generally you’ll get something. When I started to focus on things, I started working more consistently. … Then I got a little movie and did ‘Californication’ for a couple of seasons. It was just focusing on the work. I always loved acting and took it seriously but hadn’t invested my personal life into it.”
That’s when producer Dick Wolf of “Law & Order” fame cast Beghe
as Voight in episodes of “Chicago Fire.” “Apparently the story is they had the character of Voight for ‘Chicago Fire.’ It was a brand-new show and hadn’t aired yet, and NBC apparently had wanted me to do this other show. But Dick being Dick stamped his foot. And I ended up doing ‘Chicago Fire,’ and the rest is history.” Once more fate had intervened. Beghe went from “Fire” episodes to starring in “P.D.”
Divorced, he and his 14-year-old son live in Chicago now. His older son is attending college in Oregon. “My life kind of happened to me,” says the actor, 61. “My favorite quote is from Picasso when he painted the painting ‘Guernica,’ somebody asked him, ‘How do you plan a painting like that?’ Apparently, Picasso answered: ‘I paint the picture to find out what it looks like.’ I think I’ve kind of led my life like that. Sometimes you toss a canvas in the trash for sure but just go with what you’ve got and play that hand. Sometimes you’re bluffing and sometimes you’ve got all aces. It’s just a game to play.”