Neal McDonough says his refusal to film intimate scenes nearly ended his career but he has no regrets.
“Sometimes you need to be crucified in life to realize what life is really about,” McDonough said on the Nothing Left Unsaid podcast. “It’s about family. It’s about God. It’s about what you can do to make the world a better place while you’re here for that finite amount of time.”
The devout Catholic actor revealed he was fired from ABC’s Scoundrels just three days into filming after refusing to kiss co-star Virginia Madsen. “I won’t kiss any other woman because these lips are meant for one woman,” he told Closer Weekly in 2019, referring to his wife, Ruvé.
“I’d always had in my contracts that I wouldn’t kiss another woman onscreen,” he added. “My wife didn’t have any problem with it. It was me… When I couldn’t do it, and they couldn’t understand it, Hollywood just completely turned on me.”
The fallout left him out of work for nearly two years. “I couldn’t get a job, and I lost everything you could possibly imagine,” he said. “Not just houses and material things, but your swagger, your cool… your identity.”
McDonough eventually returned in Justified and overcame a struggle with alcohol. “When I stopped drinking, everything just kind of changed. Literally, the clouds parted,” he said. “OK, I am God’s child, and I have a job to do. Stop wallowing in self-pity. Dust yourself off and go hit it hard.”
Now 59, he says, “I have one boss, and it’s God, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to make my boss happy.”
In The Last Rodeo, McDonough cast his real-life wife as his love interest. “She was so great in the movie, and to k+ss my wife… in a movie that I wrote and produced and gave glory to (God) in,” he said. “I can’t imagine anything really better than that.”
