Neal McDonough says he was shut out of Hollywood for refusing to kiss anyone other than his wife, Ruvé McDonough, for his projects.
“I always had in my contracts that I wouldn’t kiss another woman on screen,” McDonough said on Wednesday’s episode of the Nothing Left Unsaid podcast. “My wife didn’t have any problem with it. It was me, really, who had a problem. I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to put you through it. I know we’re going to start having kids, and I don’t want to put my kids through it.'”
But McDonough — a veteran character actor known for his roles in Yellowstone, Band of Brothers, Arrow, Suits, Desperate Housewives, and more — says it wasn’t long before he ran into trouble over his ‘no kissing’ rule.
“When I wouldn’t do it, and they couldn’t understand it, Hollywood just completely turned on me,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me be part of the show anymore. And for two years, I couldn’t get a job, and I lost everything you could possibly imagine. Not just houses and material things, but your swagger, your cool, who you are, your identity, everything.”
Adding that he was in “a big, ugly tailspin for a couple of years,” McDonough said it wasn’t just an issue of him struggling to find jobs. He claims that, at one point, he was fired from a TV show after declining to shoot an intimate scene.
“They came to my trailer and the wardrobe lady says, ‘Excuse me, would you like to be wearing a sock for the scene?'” McDonough recalled. “I remember, I said, ‘I’m from Cape Cod and I don’t wear socks. I’ve never worn socks. I’m a loafer and no socks guy.’ She’s like, ‘What?’ And she closed the door and she walks away.”
The actor said a producer arrived a few minutes later to clarify that they needed him to wear a modesty sock for a simulated sex scene. McDonough immediately pushed back, leading to an ultimatum: “They said, ‘Well, unless you do it, we’re gonna have to replace you,'” he recalled. “I’m like, ‘Well, then replace me because I’m not gonna do it.’ And they fired me.”
He continued, “I remember flying home from Albuquerque and flying over the desert in New Mexico and realizing, ‘Okay, I just got fired from a TV show. I’d have a better chance of surviving in that desert than surviving when I land in Hollywood.’ And I was right.”
According to McDonough, the fallout included a rough patch in his career in addition to “a very painful, costly ordeal” caused by the show suing him.
Still, the actor maintains that he would do it all again. “I knew I did the right thing for my marriage,” he said in the interview. “I knew I did the right thing for [God]. And I knew I did the right thing for me.”
While McDonough did not name the show he was fired from on the podcast, he told Closer Weekly in 2019 that he was dropped from the short-lived ABC series Scoundrels in 2010 for refusing to film intimate scenes, claiming, “Everybody thought I was this religious zealot.” He added that getting a call from his Band of Brothers producer Graham Yost about a role in Justified marked his comeback.
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McDonough has since had a full circle moment courtesy of his new movie, The Last Rodeo, which McDonough wrote, directed, and stars in. The film, about a former bull rider making a comeback, called for more than one onscreen kiss for his character — so McDonough solved the problem by casting his wife in the movie.
“Well, my wife is really hot. She is a good-looking woman, and everything else can pale as compared to my wife, Ruvé,” he joked, before explaining, “It was financed. It was ready to go and I said, ‘I am not doing the movie unless you play my wife. Because I am not going to kiss some other woman on screen.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, I am not an actor.’ I’m like, ‘Well, you are now. So let’s go.'”
Listen to McDonough look back on his career highs and lows in the full podcast episode above.
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