Peter Gallagher is reminiscing a few defining second in his performing profession. It was the early aughts, and he had simply been solid in a buzzy Fox drama within the position of Sandy Cohen. Some of his pals, nonetheless, had issues. Why was he throwing all of it away on what they dismissively wrote off as a teen cleaning soap?
At the time, he was a Tony Award-nominated performer who had given acclaimed performances below administrators like Steven Soderbergh and Robert Altman. But Gallagher knew he was on to one thing. “Teen soap?” the daddy determine to a technology of “The O.C.” followers says, nonetheless a bit of flummoxed on the thought. “I thought it was a great American drama with comedy.”
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It's a late summer time morning, just a few days after the actor's 69th birthday. Gallagher arrives at Salon's New York studio early, ready, and as confidently gracious as if I have been his visitor, as an alternative of the opposite method round. It feels applicable for a person who says that the one recommendation he ever gave his youngsters was “to work harder than anybody else.”
He's again in New York City rehearsing for his first Broadway present in virtually a decade, a stage adaptation of Delia Ephron's late-in-life love story “Left on Tenth,” which began previews at the James Earl Jones Theatre this month. Gallagher plays a widower who strikes up an unexpected courtship with Julianna Margulies in the midst of mutual grief and illness. He describes the play as “a romantic comedy with harrowing moments,” and tells me, “My character says at some point that he learned early that life is a continuous cycle of joy and pain.”
It's an arc that describes Gallagher's personal profession as nicely. Shortly after graduating from Tufts University within the late Nineteen Seventies, he made his Broadway debut in “Grease” as Danny Zuko. By 1980, he was starring in his first movie, the unprophetically named “The Idolmaker.” Yet, bigger success eluded him for many years. Maybe it was his distinctive expertise for enjoying characters Altman as soon as referred to as “handsome, vain, sleazy” varieties — guys who cheat on their wives, or guys with whom married girls cheat.
Even as he racked up extra quietly sympathetic roles in cult favorites like “Dreamchild,” Gallagher admits, “I had this face when I was a young person, that frankly, if I saw me walking down the street my first thought would be, ‘F**k you.' What was that expression? God doesn't give with two hands.”
Back in 1993, he instructed the New York Times, “I always thought that if you do good work in small roles, then larger ones would follow. But maybe it will take 20 years rather than ten for it to happen that way for me.” He wasn't far off the mark.
Peter Gallagher in Midtown, New York in August (Photo by Peter Cooper for Salon)He was 47 when he landed the position on “The O.C.” His character Sandy was a witty, Berkeley-educated public defender and father to Seth, performed by Adam Brody. To the youthful technology drawn in for the present's solid of largely unknowns like Brody and Rachel Bilson, Sandy represented one thing extra important.
Even because the collection and its plot strains diversified in high quality over its four-season run from 2003 and 2007, Gallagher's character remained tv’s most reassuring position mannequin of the period — the dad many followers wished their dads could possibly be. ”I used to be in an attention-grabbing time,” he recollects, “a transition where you didn't do TV at all if you wanted to do movies. Then, that changed.” And when “The O.C.” got here alongside, he says, “I believed it was completely the most effective script I had learn in ages.”
“A story about a Jewish guy from the Bronx living with his shiksa wife” within the waspy world of southern California was, he says, “exactly the right story to be telling post 9/11.” In an anxious American period, the present provided viewers a welcome dose of uncynical coronary heart of hope.
“I never tried to be the funny one.”
The indisputable fact that “The O.C.” stays a cultural touchstone 20 years on is a degree of deep delight for Gallagher, and he is nonetheless keen on “those kids,” as he calls his youthful co-stars. Fellow “O.C.” dad Tate Donovan recollects that behind the scenes, Gallagher was as well-regarded as Sandy was on-screen, together with when he proved a relaxing presence throughout his first foray into directing in season 3.
“I sat down in the director's chair, and I looked at Peter's face, and I just relaxed. I was just like, ‘Thank God,'” Donovan tells me by way of FaceTime. “This is what it's like to work with a seasoned, great, talented actor.”
Donovan describes Gallagher because the type of actor who “makes everybody's job easier — the director, the producers, the prop people. You don't have to worry about anything,” he says, “when Peter is on set.”
Gallagher’s “Left on Tenth” co-star Margulies agrees. “He is simply a dream to work with,” she shares in an e mail to Salon, ticking off “his fearlessness, his honesty, his open heart, his charm and most importantly his talent.”
“We all can’t get over how perfect he is in this role and how much he brings to it,” she provides. “I can’t think about it being anybody else.”
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In distinction, Gallagher's personal dad — a taciturn, World War II veteran — was not a Sandy Cohen sort. “I loved my dad dearly, but he didn't talk to me,” he says.
“We labored collectively round the home and stuff, however my massive failing in life is I may by no means get him to truly discuss to me. I'd say, ‘Dad, inform me one thing,' and he'd say, ‘Ah, you may determine it out.' I did not assume he understood how vital he was to me.”
Peter Gallagher at Salon's New York studio (Photo by Peter Cooper for Salon)
Growing up within the suburbs of New York City, Gallagher’s aspirational idol wasn't his stoic father however film star, crooner, and Rat Pack legend Dean Martin. By his early twenties, Gallagher had landed on Broadway in musicals like “Grease” and “Hair.”
Over the years, his aptitude for bending his Irish allure into characters each affable and appalling stored him working steadily, racking up roles in genre-defining classics together with “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “The Player” and “While You Were Sleeping.” He took detours again to Broadway, together with a Tony-nominated efficiency within the 1986 revival of Eugene O'Neill's “Long Day's Journey Into Night” and an acclaimed flip as Sky Masterson within the 1992 revival of “Guys and Dolls,” an expertise he describes as “the hardest run I'd ever had.”
The run was tough, partly, due to how dramatically the panorama had modified within the six years he'd been away from Broadway. “I don't think we can underestimate the impact,” he says. “AIDS pretty much wiped out my entire generation. The kids in the chorus you'd see on Tuesday, and they'd be gone on Thursday.”
When he returned to the stage, he says, “All of these people were gone, and these new kids looked at me as somebody who had never done theater. I saw an interview with [director] Jerry Zaks and [costar] Nathan Lane, and he said that ‘Peter had never really done anything before he worked with us.'”
The slight nonetheless stings. “It was my seventh Broadway show,” he says. “I'd been nominated before.”
Although he says he was pleased with his work in that present, “I didn't recognize it as the theater that I had known and loved and felt a part of. I thought, to not make any money and work eight shows a week and be treated like that… life's too short.”
Gallagher, an completed vocalist who has launched an unabashedly romantic album of bluesy covers, staged a one-man present and delivered a rare model of “True Colors” for “Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist,” avoided doing musicals for 25 years.
Instead, he continued to flip in scene-stealing movie performances, usually with a contact of that signature “handsome, vain, sleazy” panache. He performed that smarmy allure memorably in Sam Mendes's Oscar-winning “American Beauty.” When he read the screenplay, he knew exactly how to get into the character of Buddy Kane, a self-professed “king of actual property.”
“I thought, well, who do I know that is a legend in his own mind?” he says. “I thought, I'm going to base this character on Donald Trump, because he was a New York real estate guy, and I could imagine him saying all those things. The Donald was my spirit guide in that performance.” When I ask him if he thinks Buddy Kane may make America nice once more, he shakes his head. “I don't think he'd have any more luck than the Donald has.”
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Despite his success in morally doubtful roles like Buddy Kane, Gallagher's personal children verify that he actually is as an alternative the candy, supportive man that followers of “The O.C.” know. Daughter Kathryn Gallagher, a Tony-nominated actor and singer, says merely that her father “taught me how to be loved.”
“I won the lottery in the dad department, because the version of my dad the world fell in love with is the version I had at home,” she tells me during a phone call. “If I can share Sandy Cohen with the world, so be it.”
“I wanted our kids to have the freedom to dream unfettered and see where it led them.”
Her filmmaker/photographer brother James provides, “It's a little surreal to have a father who is considered one of the great American dads for a fictional role he's playing, but in many ways, although different from Sandy Cohen, there's more shared DNA there than not.”
“He has a deep love for people. He listens. He looks people in the eye. Sandy's humanness is my dad's humanness. I feel immensely lucky to be his son,” he says. “I think Sandy Cohen is one of the finest fathers to ever grace the small screen, but forced to choose between the two, I'd rather be raised by Peter Gallagher.”
Peter Gallagher in dialog with Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams (Photo by Peter Cooper for Salon)
The feeling is clearly mutual. Throughout our dialog, Gallagher — who's been married for over 40 years to his faculty sweetheart, Paula Harwood — beams when speaking about his youngsters's skilled accomplishments.
“When I grew up, I took care of my mom, I took care of my dad. I felt like a little adjunct parent because my brother and sister were so much older. I was a mistake in the family,” he says with out a trace of self-pity, “busy trying to live this double life of going to school and figuring out how things work on my own and not letting anybody know how chaotic or sad it was. I wanted our kids to have the freedom to dream unfettered and see where it led them.”
Gallagher has continued to pursue his personal goals over the previous a number of years, too, finding out and working towards his singing and flexing his formidable comedic chops in collection like “New Girl” and “Grace and Frankie.” It's a ability he underplays, even when he earnestly lobs a corny dad joke at me — “You know what zero said to eight? Nice belt.” I can’t assist groaning in appreciation.
And whereas he insists he by no means tried to be “the funny one,” comedy is a part of his return to the stage in “Left on Tenth.” And he is having a very good time, even with nicely over 2,000 performances on Broadway below his personal belt.
“I still love it,” he says, leaning again comfortably on Salon’s workplace sofa. “I feel like I'm so much happier than I ever imagined a person could be.”
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