Michael O’Neill found a role that fits in ‘Council of Dads’
Although Michael O’Neill has been acting for 30 years, he feels he’s really a farmer at heart.
“I think my DNA is a farming DNA, so I believe you till the soil, and you get the best seeds you can afford, and you put them in, and you cover it, and you give it the best environment you can. And then you pray for rain ‘cause you just don’t know,” he says. “And that’s the part that helped me get through.”
Getting through — not farming but acting — took O’Neill a very long time. Although he’s costarred in “Dallas Buyers Club,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Seabiscuit,” “The West Wing” and scores of other projects, he figures he’s always been a late bloomer.
He grew up in Montgomery, Ala., the oldest child. “I was never naughty as a kid — I got naughtier as I got older. I got younger as I got older,” he says.
“I was kind of old as a kid. I had to look after my mom a lot.” His mother was often incapacitated. “I had a lot of responsibility. I felt like a loner a lot because you hide. I think for about 30 years, I’ve been looking for a role that made me feel like I fit in,” he says.
That role has finally arrived with NBC’s new drama, “Council of Dads,” which airs Thursdays. O’Neill plays the AA sponsor to a young man who’s stricken with cancer. Realizing his life is in jeopardy, the young man enlists a group of friends to act as surrogate dads.
“It’s close to my experience,” continues O’Neill. “I’m flawed, but trying to do the right thing. I’m older. I’m a Southerner. I didn’t serve in Vietnam, but that was my war … And I’m an old parent. I had my children late,” he nods.
An address that O’Neill wrote and presented his last year of college found its way to veteran actor Will Geer. Out of the blue, Geer phoned him one night.
“And he said, ‘Son, I think you ought to try acting before the corporate structure snaps you up.’ I said, ‘I don’t know anything about it.’ And he said, ‘Come to California and we’ll work with you.’”
Armed with $130 his dad had given him, O’Neill packed up his ‘71 Volkswagen bug and headed for Los Angeles. He’d loaded all the plants that he’d grown in the back, squeezing past California’s plant-restrictive border by covering them up. “And I got there, and I had $60, and I spent $58 on a guitar,” he laughs.
“And I got a job as the garage attendant at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, my first job. Ten at night till 6 in the morning. It was a rough place then. It’s tony now, but it was not then.”
He stayed in L.A. for about four years when he realized he needed training to be an actor. “So I went back to New York and studied with Bill Esper, who trained a lot of good actors,” recalls O’Neill.
“He really saved me. He turned to me about 10 o’clock one morning and said, ‘Son, you’re going to have to watch your drinking.’ It took a while, but I did eventually. He presented it in a way — it was hard — he said, ‘It’s gonna be hard. It’s gonna take you maybe 10 or 12 years. Or maybe more — maybe 20.’ And I still discover things and realize that’s was he meant almost 40 years ago now.”
It was six years before O’Neill finally copped a paycheck as an actor. “I was working construction, garages, whatever I could do to keep body and soul together. A bicycle messenger in New York — that was one of the craziest jobs I ever worked. Used to unload box cars on the Penn line, did carpentry work, taught fifth grade for a little while in a parochial school,” he says.
“I waited tables to pay for acting school, worked doubles on the weekends. I got fired from every waiting job I had. I think I might’ve had a little bit of an ‘attitude.’ I wasn’t always gracious about it. The last job I got fired at, I got fired for throwing spoons at the owner.”
O’Neill was 45 when he finally married attorney Mary O’Keefe. “She moved to California, married a violinist, and that didn’t last too long,” he muses. “And I was living with an actress in New York, and that didn’t last very long.
“And I kept running into her. I was shooting a film in California, and I would bump into her in the foyer of a theater.
“Or I was walking down Broadway in New York and bumped into her at 64th and Broadway. We finally bumped into each other at the root beer section of Gelson’s market in Marina del Rey. It was about the ninth time we’d done that. So I said, ‘You want to go out? We should figure out what this is.’ So we did.”
But the late bloomer didn’t waste any time becoming a father. Their first daughter was born two years after they married, and twin girls arrived the following year. All three are college-trained and have no interest in show business.
Looking back, O’Neill ponders, “For every public moment I’ve ever enjoyed, my family’s paid the private price for it. I think I’m a decent dad, I’m a fair husband — she’s still trying to train me; she’s working on it. Because of the uncertainty and because I was so self-absorbed, I think I missed a lot with my family. In that regard, there was a price that was paid.”