UPDATE BELOW: Neal McDonough responds to the headlines over his TMZ interview.
From Variety:
Neal McDonough, the veteran character actor who has appeared in everything from “Band of Brothers” to “Desperate Housewives,” “Minority Report,” “American Horror Story,” “Suits” and more, revealed during an interview on the “Nothing Left Unsaid” podcast (exclusive shared by TMZ) that Hollywood shut him out when he refused to kiss other actors on screen. McDonough has been married to Ruvé Robertson since 2003. The couple has five children together.
“I’d always had in my contracts I wouldn’t kiss another woman on-screen,” McDonough said. “My wife didn’t have any problem with it. It was me, really, who had a problem with it. When I couldn’t do it, and they couldn’t understand it, Hollywood just completely turned on me. They wouldn’t let me be part of the show anymore.”
“For two years, I couldn’t get a job and I lost everything you could possibly imagine,” McDonough added. “Not just houses and material things, but your swagger, your cool, who you are, your identity—everything. My identity was an actor, and a really good one. And once you don’t have that identity, you’re kind of lost in a tailspin.”
McDonough has been acting since 1990 and just headlined the Angel Studios drama film “The Last Rodeo,” in which he played a former bull-riding world champion who returns to the rodeo later in life in order to win money for his grandson’s brain tumor surgery. The film opened in theaters in late May and grossed $15 million on a production budget in the $8 million range.
His Wikipedia biography notes this 2010 item from Deadline.com:
Neal McDonough is a marvelous actor who elevates every role he plays, whether it’s in Band of Brothers or Desperate Housewives. So when he was suddenly replaced with David James Elliott 3 days into the filming on ABC’s new series Scoundrels earlier this week, there had to be a story behind the story. The move was officially explained as a casting change. But, in fact, McDonough was sacked because of his refusal to do some heated love scenes with babelicious star (and Botox pitchwoman) Virginia Madsen. The reason? He’s a family man and a Catholic, and he’s always made it clear that he won’t do sex scenes. And ABC knew that. Because he also didn’t get into action with Nicolette Sheridan on the network’s Desperate Housewives when he played her psycho husband during Season 5. And he also didn’t do love scenes with his on-air girlfriend in his previous series, NBC’s Boomtown, or that network’s Medical Investigation. “It has cost him jobs, but the man is sticking to his principles,” a source explained to me. You can’t help but admire McDonough for sticking to his beliefs, even if he’s poised to lose as much as $1 million in paydays for Scoundrels.
UPDATE: Neal McDonough and his wife evidently want to clarify what he told TMZ.
Neal McDonough would like a second take.
After making headlines for saying on a recent podcast that Hollywood “completely turned on me” for refusing to kiss anyone other than his wife, the veteran actor and his better half walked back those remarks in a joint interview with TMZ.
“We want to say thank you, Hollywood,” Ruvé McDonough said, expressing gratitude for her husband’s success in showbiz. “I don’t like how people are saying that Hollywood turned its back on Neal. No, it didn’t. The right people found Neal and put him in the right place. We want to say thank you, Hollywood. We want to continue doing incredible films with Neal, giving the right messages. We don’t want to say Hollywood turned. Guided us to where we are is what Hollywood did, and we want to say, ‘Thank you, Hollywood.'”
… She also reiterated their good fortune, saying, “We cannot explain and express how blessed we are, how happy we are. Everything that’s going on, talking about how Hollywood dissed Neal and whatnot — no. Everything that’s happened has brought us closer to where we are now.”
Photo: by Gage Skidmore / Wikipedia / Creative Commons license
