When Neal McDonough was first asked to play the devil in a new movie, he turned it down.
“I can’t play Lucifer,” the 57-year-old actor, a Catholic, remembered saying. “That’s just too dark.”
McDonough, who has starred in movies from “Minority Report” to “Captain America: The First Avenger” and TV shows from “Boomtown” to “Yellowstone,” has embraced the villain role before. But the devil, he said, gave him pause.
His wife, Ruvé, changed his mind. After they prayed about it, she encouraged him to take the part, saying that he was the best man for the job as a talented big-screen villain and as someone with one of the best relationships with God in Hollywood.
That’s how McDonough became “The Benefactor” in “The Shift,” a modern retelling of the book of Job that hit theaters in December and is available for streaming online. The film from Angel Studios follows protagonist Kevin Garner (Kristoffer Polaha) as he searches for his wife and refuses to give up hope or his faith after a peculiar adversary — the Benefactor — places him in an alternate dystopian reality.
Following the filming, McDonough spoke with Our Sunday Visitor about his enthusiasm for his latest role and its impact on his faith, his passion for acting, his refusal to do sex scenes, and his love for God and his family.
“My faith is everything,” he said. “God first, me second. Family first, me second. Those are the tenets we live by in our house.”
Change in ‘The Shift’
Today, McDonough considers his past villain roles all practice for his new role in “The Shift.”
“I’ve had to be the villain du jour,” he said, prefacing that he refuses to do sex scenes in movies. “It’s been a great career. I have five amazing kids. I have to provide for them and give them all the great things of life — and I’ve been able to do that by being a great villain.”
Playing the role of the villain, he said, led him to examine himself as a person.
“It’s funny, when I’ve played the villain roles, it makes me realize how blessed I am because you have to go to certain places in your thought and, as a method actor as I am, to dig deep and find things — sometimes find things you don’t like about yourself, and you have to fix those things,” he said.
Without first realizing those flaws, he added, a person cannot fix or even have a conversation about them.
“But doing this psychoanalysis of myself while playing certain characters,” he added, “just makes me a stronger person, a bigger believer, and makes life just so much easier knowing that people can say or do whatever they want to me, I know the truth of situations, and I know that He is always there for me and for everyone else who believes in Him.”
If viewers take away one thing from watching his new film, McDonough wanted that to be hope.
“There’s always hope,” he said. “The lead character gets dragged through some horrible things, and other characters in the film also get dragged through difficult, terrible, painful situations. But the ones who did the best by the end of the film were the ones who had the most hope and faith in Him that He is always there for us no matter what.”
Pointing to his own personal life as an example, McDonough revealed that he gave up drinking alcohol eight years ago.
“That was a very difficult thing to give up,” he said. “Knowing that He had my back and knowing that Ruvé is here with me, supporting me to get through it, I don’t think I could have gotten through it if I didn’t have faith.”
“Because I knew that He loved me and He wanted me to stop things and get on a certain path and kind of right the boat and that’s what we did,” he added.
This film, he said, also conveys the message of God’s presence.
“I’ve been through terrible things in my life and how you come out of it is having that absolute faith that God has your back and that we’re here for a finite amount of time,” he said. “Let’s do His will. Let’s live by the 10 Commandments. Let’s do the best that we can to honor Him in everything that we do and great things will happen through thick and thin, through great times and bad times.”
A different kind of acting
In years past, McDonough made headlines for refusing to do sex scenes, kiss other actors, or take the Lord’s name in vain on camera.
At the same time, he stressed, his faith has never been an obstacle in his career.
“How can that ever be an obstacle?” he asked.
Instead, he refuses to kiss other women on screen, he said, because he loves his wife, a former model-turned-producer.
“That got me in trouble years ago because I wouldn’t do something I wasn’t comfortable doing,” he said, likely referring to when he was reportedly fired from the television show “Scoundrels” in 2010 for refusing to do sex scenes. “That wasn’t really because of religion or anything, it’s just because I love my wife so much.”
“I just didn’t really feel like putting my wife through this stuff because I’ve seen a lot of my buddies put their wives through these things and then after a while they don’t have wives anymore,” he explained. “Because it’s got to be hard. It is hard.”
But, he hinted, viewers of an upcoming movie that he wrote and is producing with his wife called “The Last Rodeo,” will see him kiss.
“I have flashbacks to my wife who passed away years ago,” he said. “And Ruvé is going to play my wife and there’s one scene where I get to make out with my wife on screen. I cannot wait for that one!”
Instead of hindering his career, McDonough’s faith sustained him, he said.
“If anything, my faith is what got me through times when people wouldn’t hire me because I wouldn’t do certain things,” he said.
“I knew I was never going to be the hero of the big movies because I wouldn’t kiss the woman in the end,” he added. “That’s fine by me, I don’t really care, I just want to be able to create and act and do what I love doing, knowing that I’m doing it for the right reasons.”
He stressed that he is more concerned about his ability to be the best actor when it’s his time on screen.
“That’s kind of what I really pride myself on, that if I’m hired for a job, I’m going to work my tail off to make sure that I don’t let anybody down: The investors, the producers, the writers, the directors, the fellow cast,” he said. “But also my family and for God.”
“I want to make sure that I’m doing the best performance — even if it’s a villain,” he said. “If there’s no villain, the hero isn’t so heroic, so I take it upon myself to make my villains really kind of different.”
The McDonough Company
Together, McDonough said, he and his wife are about to produce their fifth project.
“That was through the grace of God, that this has all happened and we get to tell stories the way that we think stories should be told for Him, that give light to Him even through the darkness,” he said.
His new production company with his wife, The McDonough Company, he said, is growing and expanding.
“It’s kind of a humbling, really humbling feeling that I get to do what I love to do opposite my wife and produce movies and TV shows that give glory to Him,” he said at another point. “What an awesome gift that is.”
His plan for the future, he said, is to “keep making content.”
“If you watch our films, we want them to be morality plays, very Shakespearean,” he said. “At the end of a great film … when there’s room for a conversation thereafter and you can discuss things and learn from those discussions, that’s awesome, and that’s what we aspire to do.”
With “The Shift,” McDonough encouraged viewers to do something similar: After seeing the film with their families at the theater, they should have a discussion after.
“That’s what we do with our kids,” he said. “Yeah, Dad was in it, that’s great. But they loved the movie.”
