You’ve seen him in movies such as “Seabiscuit,” “Transformers,” “Sea of Love” and “Dallas Buyers Club.” His face also is familiar from a wealth of TV series: “The West Wing,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal,” “Bates Motel,” “Extant,” “Rectify” and more.
Michael O’Neill, an Alabama native, has a resume that any character actor would be proud to claim. He’s played heroes and villains, senators and cops, judges and sheriffs. And dads. Lately, lots of dads, including a surrogate father on a heartwarming NBC series in 2020.
“For a guy that they said, ‘You’re not going to make it,’ it worked out OK,” O’Neill, 71, says. “I never really thought about it as a career. I thought about the next job. It’s like a shark: If you stop moving, you go down.”
O’Neill, who was born and raised in Montgomery, lives in California with his wife, Mary O’Keefe O’Neill. The couple has three grown daughters: Ella, Annie and Molly. The O’Neills raised their children in Birmingham for several years, but the West Coast beckoned, along with the acting opportunities it provides.
“Sometimes I look back and I go, ‘Oh, God, it was a career,’” O’Neill says. “That was a little shocking to me. Young actors will say, ‘I’d love to have the career you had.’ I don’t know about that. I don’t know about career. Just get a job.”
On a recent visit to his home state, O’Neill told AL.com about five projects he’s added to his resume, from a Netflix mystery series to a sports movie with Hollywood stars.
“ALABAMA BOYS”
What: O’Neill returns to his alma mater, Auburn University, to star in a two-man play with Thom Gossom Jr., a longtime friend and fellow Auburn alum.
Where to see it: Oct. 26-27 at 7:30 p.m., Woltosz Theatre, Gogue Performing Arts Center, 910 S. College St., Auburn. Tickets are $35 at the box office (334-844-8497) or via the Gogue website.
More on the play: “Gossom and O’Neill both have enjoyed prolific careers as actors of film, screen and stage; their journeys into the world of show business launched from the soil of their native Alabama,” the Gogue Center website says. “Penned by Gossom and O’Neill, and produced by fellow Auburn alumnus Walt Woltosz, ‘Alabama Boys’ is an honest reflection by two men — one Black, one white — on growing up in Alabama during the civil rights era. The play traces their formative years and examines how their time at Auburn shaped the rest of their lives.”
O’Neill says: “Thom and I have been friends for 25 years. ... I grew up in Montgomery at the heart of the civil rights movement, and he grew up in Birmingham at the heart of the civil rights movement, and we track that in the play, as children.
“He went to Auburn; I went to Auburn. He played football there and I was in student government. I knew who he was, but I never met the man until 1997. Alfre Woodard introduced me to him. He became an actor; I became an actor. So part of it is our journey, certainly through that childhood period of time, and our years at Auburn, and going through separation and segregation, and coming together. He’s telling stories; I’m telling stories. … I think we’re trying to stir history a little bit. You get the friendship. You get what binds us.
“The play moves. It varies. Some of it is monologues, and it’s totally autobiographical. There’s poetry in it; there’s humor. There’s a device in it with a marbles game, where we’re shooting marbles as children. My mother calls me and says, ‘You can’t do that anymore.’ It was the start of segregation. How do you explain that to a child? And he had his experience, playing in gyms where they didn’t want him, schools where they didn’t want him there. We were boys growing up. As a boy, how do you make sense of all this?”
“ECHOES”
What: Seven-episode thriller about identical twins, both played by Michelle Monaghan. O’Neill portrays their father, who becomes enmeshed in a mystery involving his daughters.
Storyline: “Leni and Gina are identical twins who have secretly swapped their lives since they were children, culminating in a double life as adults, but one of the sisters goes missing and everything in their perfectly schemed world turns into chaos,” an IMDB synopsis says.
Cast includes: Matt Bomer, Karen Robinson, Ali Stroker, Daniel Sunjata.
Where to see it: The miniseries, which made its debut in August, is streaming on Netflix.
O’Neill says: “Michelle Monaghan is a lovely actress; I’ve done a couple of projects with her. She plays identical twins, which is a gargantuan task. I’ve rarely seen an actor work as hard as she had to work, because the device of the story is that they swap lives. Once a year, they swap lives. They lost their mom when they were little, and it damaged them.
“I play the father. I had three daughters and I was lost in my own grief. I was overwhelmed — too overwhelmed to pick up the fact that they were doing this. They started early, and when one would get into trouble, the other would cover for her. So it became this pathology that extended into their adult lives. Once a year, when they would change, they would change families. They would change cities. So you have, from the get-go, a dysfunction. Then one of them disappears, and the other twin tries to keep it going by playing both characters. Therein lies the beginning of the trouble.
“Ali Stroker, who won a Tony for her performance in ‘Oklahoma!,’ plays the third daughter. I was so rich in daughters on this show. But I have identical twins (daughters Annie and Molly), so my perspective as Victor (the characters’ father) was a little bit different, in that I had seen my twins swap, but more as a ‘Can we get away with it? Can we fool them?’ There was nothing malicious in it; it was a polite game.
“But you find out (on ‘Echoes’) that these women have issues in their past, and their manipulation to get out of the issues was the swapping thing they started. … It’s a mystery thriller; there’s a con game in it. There’s a backstory that has a haunting quality that keeps intruding, and drives this thing.”
MATT DAMON/BEN AFFLECK NIKE MOVIE
What: A film about Nike sports marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro and his determined efforts to sign a deal with basketball star Michael Jordan in the mid-1980s. Damon plays Vaccaro; Affleck plays Nike co-founder Phil Knight.
More on the movie: “Affleck will direct, star and co-write. Damon will produce, co-write and star,” Variety said. “The film will follow Vaccaro’s conquest and introduce audiences to Jordan’s parents, in particular his powerful and dynamic mother, as well as former coaches, advisors, friends and those close to Jordan.”
Cast includes: Viola Davis, Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, Marlon Wayans.
Where to see it: The movie is in post-production, according to IMDB. An official title hasn’t been announced -- O’Neill says the working title was “New Model” -- and a release date is TBA.
O’Neill says: “I just worked on a wonderful film called ‘New Model.’ It’s the story of how Nike signed Michael Jordan to a basketball shoe contract. Converse was king. They had Magic, they had Bird, they had Dr. J, Julius Erving. They had a litany of guys. Converse was the king. Affleck directed it; Damon’s starring in it.
“I play a Converse exec. It’s a lovely film. When I read the script, I went, ‘Oh, my God.’ I had no idea about this, nor the stakes that were involved. I just finished that. We filmed in LA. I really do have a … don’t blink, you’ll miss me. But I had so much fun working on it. It’s coming. It’ll be in theaters.”
“BOUND”
What: Short film starring O’Neill and Mike Pniewski, who wrote the script with his friend in mind. O’Neill and his wife produced the movie with Pniewski and his wife, director Jaye Pniewski.
Funding: The producers raised nearly $47,000 with a crowd-funding campaign on Seed & Spark, a site that specializes in movie projects.
Storyline: “Jason and Jim Koss are estranged brothers who have come together after the death of their father, a well respected academic but painfully overbearing parent,” says a synopsis on Seed & Spark. “Surrounded by decades of dad’s writings and memories, old wounds resurface as the brothers are faced with a life or death choice.”
Where to see it: Screenings are planned at film festivals around the country, including the Fairhope Film Festival.
O’Neill says: “Mike Pniewski is a wonderful character actor. He’s one of those actors that I watch, because he’s so honest. We did a film together 30 years ago, called ‘Letters from a Wayward Son,’ with Harry Connick Jr. and Pete Postlethwaite. It was a lovely film. Walt Goggins was in it; Patricia Clarkson was in it. And Mike and I always said, ‘You know, we should do something together.’ A few years ago, he made a short called ‘Mend,’ which is a lovely, lovely film about a man who loses his wife and how he tries to get over it, how he tries to mend.
“He came to me with a little script that he’d written called ‘Bound,’ about two brothers that had been estranged for years, and their father passes. Part of the reason for their estrangement is the old man was so hard on them. He was a real task master, tough guy, ex-military. And they’re forced to come together to deal with their father’s effects. It’s 11 minutes, I think, that first blush of being together. My character needs something from his character, so there’s a conflict.
“It’s difficult to tell the entire story in 11 minutes — have a beginning, a middle and an end — and have something satisfying for an audience to go, “Oh, I see where they are. Oh, they’re going there? Oh, they ended up there?’ … We shot in Atlanta, rented a house for three or four days. So that is my venture into filmmaking.”
“WAR OF THE WORLDS”
What: Sci-fi movie based on the novel by H.G. Wells, directed by Rich Lee.
Cast includes: Ice Cube, Eva Longoria, Iman Benson.
Good to know: Filming took place in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic, using technology that allowed the actors to perform their roles remotely.
More on the movie: “Plot details are vague other then it being described as a grounded sci-fi film ... that touches on themes of privacy versus surveillance,” Deadline Hollywood said. “The idea behind this format that was part of the presentation is a production that had the look of commercial event film but at the budget of a contained thriller. This new technology will allow for a fully remote production with all actors and crew working from their individual separate locations. So basically if Cube wanted his part of the shoot to be done from his home, it could be done without a problem and with crew working from somewhere else.”
Where to see it: The movie is in post-production, according to IMDB, with a release date TBA.
O’Neill says: “I shot it during the pandemic, and I had to be the camera operator, the sound man and the actor all at once. I had to hold the camera, because you couldn’t be in the room with anybody. There was no vaccine at the time we shot.
“One of the scenes I remember, I was in a car, and the driver was driving, but there was a panel between he and I, and he had a mask on. I had the camera in the back seat, with a sound element to it that I had to adjust. It was virtually renegade filmmaking. I worked with Ice Cube and Eva Longoria, but they were, for me, tiny little pictures. We did the best we could. I don’t know what we got, but we did the best we could under the circumstances.”
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