It’s cool to see big stars take on TV roles, but their high salaries have made the rest of ours as randomized as Scrabble tiles.Martin Sheen made $300,000 per episode on “The West Wing”. But what about a guy on that show that I really liked: Michael O’Neill, who played the head of the Secret Service? That’s him on the left.
Michael really brought authority to his role. Even his mustache assured me that the President was never gonna get his ass kicked.
In addition to “The West Wing”, Michael’s appeared in over 60 TV shows and movies. He was the trainer in Seabiscuit. He co-starred opposite Michael Caine and Robert Duvall in Secondhand Lions. Yet he still has to put in time as a construction worker to make ends meet.
Last year, the Sunday LA Times ran a huge piece about him. He’s the father of three young daughters, and he and his wife often have what they call “the talk”, in which Michael considers giving up acting and moving to Idaho for a more reasonable cost of living.
Not three days after the Times ran the article, I was sitting in an acting workshop when Michael came in to watch one of his actor friends perform her scene. I hadn’t performed yet, and felt an instant overdose of anxiety with him in the room.
I pulled it together and felt good about my scene, and after the workshop approached Michael and told him I was a fan. He gave me the most skeptical look, wondering how I could feel that way about a character actor. I told him I’d read the Times article and he instantly warmed up, confiding in me that he worried that he’d come off as bitter. I reassured him that he hadn’t, and that I viewed him as an actor who’d paid his dues and deserved better. He shook my hand.
I watched Transformers last night, and Michael has a pretty substantial role in the film, maybe one of the meatiest of his career. I hope he was appropriately paid for it. Let someone else lay the rebar in this town.
