Neal McDough, Hollywood Survivor
“My ultimate celluloid fantasy is to play Captain Kirk’s son,” reveals actor Neal McDonough, star of NBC’s short-lived Medical Investigation. His fantasy is very detailed: “We come back and we battle everyone and we kill everyone. All these people will be on board the ship: Picard and Spock and everyone. And there’s me and Dad and we’ll say, ‘No, get off . . .the . . .ship. We’ll pick . . . you . . .up . . .on the . . .way back.'”
McDonough’s Shatner impression is hysterical as he whips himself into a teary-eyed frenzy. “And so we’ll get everyone off the doomed ship, me and Dad, and we’ll drive it into the sun, sacrificing ourselves and the Enterprise and save everyone. That would be celluloid heaven. Me and Dad.” He sniffles. “I’m weeping now.”
Well, he doesn’t get to play Captain Kirk’s son, but McDonough, who confesses to keeping framed portraits of his mother, the Virgin Mary and William Shatner in his bedroom, did find himself aboard the starship Enterprise in the Star Trek: Next Generation film, Star Trek: First Contact, as Ensign Hawk.
“I’m like the young hunk in the movie and they gave me such a hard time about it,” he says. “I thought it was going to be this closed, snobbish, tough set to work on. But these guys were busting on each other all day long. They tried to make me the young studbuck and that’s what they called me: ‘Studbuck.’
“They showed no mercy to me; they just crushed me, belittled me as much as possible. Especially during my close-ups, Patrick Stewart was trying to make me break, trying to make me screw up my lines every single time. Finally, I said to Jonathan Frakes, who’s the director, ‘Can I return some?’ and he said, ‘Sure absolutely.'”
One of six children and part of a very close family growing up in Cape Cod, McDonough said that as a child he quickly realized that he had two options: he could get up on the table and dance and sing and make everyone laugh or he could get beat up by his brothers. He opted for a life in show business.
“From a very young age, I was the ham,” he remembers. “My first play was when I was a freshman in high school. I played Snoopy in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and the seniors hated me. My mom used to tell me that they were just jealous of me, so at rehearsals, I would say, ‘My mom says I don’t have to sing in front of you people. I’m not singing till opening night.’ I was this fourteen-year-old prima dona. For some reason, the director had faith in me.
“Every night when I went home, my mom would play the piano and I would sing and she would choreograph the numbers for me. Opening night cam and I froze. I could hear the seniors laughing at me, and I couldn’t make a sound. Then I looked down in the front row and saw my mom giving me a big thumbs-up, and everything was fine. I nailed it. I got a standing ovation.”
When he began working in Hollywood, McDonough found himself doing a lot of science fiction. “I get letters from sci-fi fans because I was on Quantum Leap, where I played a drunken baseball player who has a problem with his father, and then I was on VR.5 where I played this drunken astronaut with a father problem, and you know, I did White Dwarf where I was this drunk guy with a father problem,” he says. “So I get this letter from this guy who says, ‘Neal, I think you’re great. I’ve been following your career for a long time and I was wondering, do you have a problem with your father?’
“My dad’s a little concerned-he says I’m too convincing.”
McDonough has had his share of set-backs in the acting business; two series in which he starred – first, Boomtown, and more recently, Medical Investigation – were both canceled. And he’s had a growing amount of success: he had a major supporting role in 2002’s Minority Report, alongside Tom Cruise, as well as a role in the acclaimed TV mini-series Band of Brothers. Next, he’ll take a starring role in the independent film American Gothic.
Anyone who wants to succeed and work as an actor, he says, has to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is something he or she needs to do. “If you’re a writer and they don’t like your writing, well OK. If you’re a painter and they don’t like your writing, well, too bad, you’ll just paint a new one. If you’re on stage and they don’t like you or you’re in front of a camera and they don’t like you, it’s because they don’t like YOU. And it’s so hard. All you have to work with is yourself.
“Oscar Wilde put it best, I think, when he said, ‘Art is useless to everyone but the artist himself.’ Too many actors in this town go to auditions and they get really upset. I just feel like this is probably the last time you’re ever going to play this character. Enjoy it. Have a good time. Either that or go back to Boise and be a plumber.”
Worse than rejection, McDonough says, is to let god-given talent go unused. “That must make God so mad,” he says. “Can you imagine: he gives someone this beautiful voice and then he’s up there going, ‘Why don’t he sing? What can I do?’ Nah, I’m not going to let him down. He’s given me too much, a modicum of talent here, and I’m running with it. I’m fooling everyone.” And if William Shatner ever decides to return to the big screen as Captain Kirk, McDonough hopes he’ll give him a call.
