Prime Time

What has actor Chris O’Donnell been up to lately? For the first few hours of the day, his schedule could be anyone’s: He wakes up, makes some coffee, reads the paper, and gets in a bit of exercise—maybe a sauna and cold plunge, too—before he heads to work. For O’Donnell, though, work these days means showing up to the set of a hit television show, the ABC firehouse drama 9-1-1: Nashville, where he’ll spend the next twelve hours or so fighting blazes for the cameras. Now in its second season, Nashville became the most-watched new broadcast series among adults when it premiered last year. O’Donnell, who is also an executive producer on the show, is at the center of the action as fire department captain Don Hart.

It’s the latest big television role for O’Donnell, who has been acting on the small screen for years now. Of course, for many people, he’ll forever be associated with the movies that made him famous, such as his Golden Globe–nominated performance in Scent of a Woman—which he made while he was still a student at Boston College—swashbuckling action movies like The Three Musketeers and two Batman blockbusters, and romantic dramas and comedies including Circle of Friends and In Love and War. But in 2009, O’Donnell made a successful transition to TV, landing the main role on NCIS: Los Angeles, a procedural drama about federal special agents. He remained for the show’s nearly fourteen-year-long run, finding it to be the kind of steady, reliable work that suited the life he had built. “Broadcast TV is the closest thing to a nine-to-five you can get in show business,” O’Donnell told me recently. “I really liked making films when I was young and getting to live all over the world for months at a time, but it’s different when you have a family. The stability that TV gave me, I was really fortunate that it came along.”

Sure, there’s a certain romance to movie stardom, but it also comes with a nagging uncertainty: What’s my next project? Nowadays, major studios are making far fewer movies compared to the era in which O’Donnell debuted, and only about half of Americans have even seen a movie in theaters within the past year. On television, O’Donnell has millions of households across the country tuning in to watch him weekly. “This industry is feast or famine for many people,” O’Donnell said. “I think most actors would tell you that steady work on TV is hard to beat.”

It was the fall of 1991, and the film director Robert Mandel was about to yell “action!” on the Massachusetts set of School Ties, a drama about anti-Semitism at an elite New England prep school in the 1950s. The movie featured an ensemble of then-unknown actors who would later go on to become big stars, including Brendan Fraser, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck… and Chris O’Donnell. He was taking a break from his actual student life at Boston College to make one of his first movies. On this day, the cast was shooting a scene in a school bathroom. Right before he rolled the camera, Mandel told the boys to act natural, to do what they’d normally do while getting ready in the morning. “One thing I remember about Chris is that he would make unique choices,” Mandel recalled recently. “Most of the guys started brushing their teeth or shaving. Chris started clipping his toenails.”

It was a moment of disarming authenticity that sort of sums up O’Donnell’s easy charm as an actor. What an offbeat yet organic thing to do! “He was a natural,” Mandel said. “It’s a wonderful thing when an actor can make it look effortless.” In speaking to several filmmakers who’ve worked with him, it was O’Donnell’s genuineness that was most often mentioned as key to his success. He’s a talented and telegenic guy, they said, who is also refreshingly down to earth.  

“I’ve never been comfortable with the fame side of things,” O’Donnell himself told me. Growing up in a big Catholic family in Winnetka, Illinois, he didn’t even set out to be an actor, which is not to say he’s ever been camera-shy. When he was thirteen years old, O’Donnell decided he wanted to make money as a teen model and started cold-calling talent agencies in the yellow pages. “I was too little a guy to make the sports teams, and I was looking for something to do,” he said. “The idea of getting paid to have my picture in the paper sounded pretty cool.” After his sister connected him with an agent she’d met at a wedding, O’Donnell started getting work in print ads and TV commercials, including one where he played a McDonald’s worker serving a McMuffin to Michael Jordan. Even at that young age, O’Donnell, the son of a radio executive and a real estate broker, started investing his earnings in the stock market. “I was a little businessman,” he said. “I had an accountant who couldn’t believe the stuff I was coming up with.”

O’Donnell may have seen himself as a mini mogul, but once he caught the eye of Hollywood executives, they saw a movie star. “Chris had a very natural charm,” said the prolific film producer Jon Avnet. Fresh off launching Tom Cruise’s career with Risky Business, Avnet helped to cast the teenaged O’Donnell in his first film, Men Don’t Leave, where he played the son of a widowed mother portrayed by Jessica Lange. The untrained young actor was already conducting himself as a pro, Avnet said. “After one dramatic scene where Chris was fantastic, director Paul Brickman and I asked him, ‘What was it that opened that scene up for you, to make it so emotional?’ Chris said, ‘I looked at the two of you and thought, I better not let them down.’”

And yet, for all his obvious promise, the only thing O’Donnell really wanted at that point was to be a typical college student. He’d watched his six older siblings, including BC grad Sara O’Donnell Groenings ’83, come and go from university life, and he was eager for his turn. It finally came in January of 1989, when he arrived at his four-man dorm room on Newton Campus. “I was so excited,” O’Donnell said. “I felt like I was being shot out of a cannon.” He didn’t tell his classmates that he’d spent the fall on a film set. “I didn’t want to get labeled as the kid that did a movie,” he said. “I just wanted to fit in and find my spot.”

For the next few years, O’Donnell would lead two lives. In one, he was traveling to movie sets around the country and, as time went on, attending red carpet premieres and Hollywood awards ceremonies. In the other, he was a marketing major cramming for his classes, rushing the field after football games, and tailgating with soon-to-be-lifelong friends. BC is even where he met his future wife, Caroline Fentress O’Donnell, the sister of a roommate.“

Chris’s acting was amazing for someone so removed from the acting world,” said Martin Brest, who directed O’Donnell in Scent of a Woman. O’Donnell played a prep school student caretaking an irascible blind veteran portrayed by Al Pacino. “I remember him coming up to me halfway through filming with a copy of People magazine and an article about all the different movies Al Pacino had been in—The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon,” Brest said.  “He held it up to me and said, ‘Did you know Al was in all these movies?’”

O’Donnell did his best to keep his two lives separate. But he could only manage the secret for so long. During his sophomore year, he was outed as an actor by none other than Barbra Streisand, who called O’Donnell’s dorm room looking to chat with him about a role. His gobsmacked roommate relayed the message. A few months later, Men Don’t Leave was finally released. Word had already gotten around campus that O’Donnell was an actor, he said, and “half of Walsh Hall” descended on a movie theater in Chestnut Hill to watch it with him on opening night. A melodrama about a single mom wasn’t exactly tailor-made for rowdy college students, but it made for fond memories when his two worlds crashed together. “I definitely remember the sound of beer bottles rolling down the floor of the theater,” O’Donnell recalled.

 “This industry is a total rollercoaster,” O’Donnell told me over the summer, just before he started filming season two of Nashville. “The ups and downs are very public.”

For most of the ’90s, it was all ups. Hollywood kept calling, and it was one movie, magazine cover, and talk show appearance after another. O’Donnell carved out a big niche as a likeable, handsome “it” actor of his generation, appearing in dramas, action movies, and on-screen romances with the era’s leading ladies, from Drew Barrymore to Sandra Bullock to Renée Zellweger. “He has that old-school film star quality,” said Gary Sinyor, who directed O’Donnell opposite Zellweger in the romantic comedy The Bachelor, a 1999 remake of a 1925 Buster Keaton classic.

Brest, the Scent of a Woman director, told me that through it all, O’Donnell remained levelheaded. “When the movie was in the home stretch, and Chris was getting accolades, he told me he was going to go back and finish his degree,” Brest said. “Most people would say, ‘I’m a young Hollywood guy now. I’m going to run with that.’ I was taken by how grounded he was. He wasn’t remotely seduced by it all. Acting was a career, not a mistress.”

“I was honestly having way more fun at school,” O’Donnell recalled. In retrospect, he said, his BC school ties helped set a stabilizing foundation for his career. “If you make mistakes and get out of control under the bright lights of Hollywood, it can be a dangerous place,” he said. “I think college life separated me from some of the other actors who were running in the same group. I was young and immature. College life was healthy for me. I needed more time to grow up.”

After graduating, O’Donnell landed the role that any young Hollywood actor would die for. He was cast as the superhero Robin in 1995’s record-breaking blockbuster Batman Forever. “That was the one that really changed my life,” he said. Suddenly, his face was on billboards, city buses, and souvenir cups at fast food restaurants. “The publicity machine on a film like that is unbelievable, and it’s worldwide. Suddenly, you’re recognizable to everybody.”

Which only makes it more devastating when the rollercoaster dips. The 1997 sequel Batman & Robin was a commercial and critical bust, and O’Donnell’s opportunities slowed down into the early aughts. “One day you’re offered every role in the world, and the next day, no one’s knocking,” he recalled. “You have to have a strong support system around you.” O’Donnell poured even more of his time into his growing family. Today, he and Caroline have five children, three of whom have attended BC.

In figuring out his next moves, O’Donnell also expanded into new mediums. He made his Broadway debut in 2002 in a revival of Arthur Miller’s play The Man Who Had All the Luck, which was “the most educational experience in acting I’ve ever had,” he said. And he started popping up on television, most notably in a recurring role on Grey’s Anatomy, which set the stage for his success on the small screen.

Today, with his kids mostly grown, he’d like to get back to making films at some point, he said. But right now life is good. When he’s not working, O’Donnell spends plenty of time indulging his lifelong love of golf, which is one of his favorite ways to meet people, satisfy his competitive side, and recenter himself away from the hubbub of the entertainment industry. “As I’ve gotten older, golf and going to Mass are the two things that really settle me,” he said. “You could be anywhere in the world, walk onto a golf course, smell the grass clippings, and feel settled. It’s the same thing walking into a church.”

His wife and their youngest child are still back in Los Angeles, but he said that if Nashville continues to be a success, the O’Donnells might make Music City their permanent residence. After all, the other four kids are all East Coasters now, the family has a summer home in Maine, and O’Donnell remains a big BC sports fan who comes back to campus for games several times a year. His connection to the University remains something he values. He’s a member of the BC Board of Regents, he received an honorary degree in 2017, and he even narrated a student performance of the orchestral work Lincoln Portrait at Boston Symphony Hall in honor of the University’s 150th anniversary.

After riding the Hollywood rollercoaster for as long as he has, he said he doesn’t take this chapter of his life—busy yet balanced—for granted. “When I was younger, I felt so much pressure that everything I did had to be more successful than the last. Then when you have something that’s not successful, it’s crushing,” he said. “The longer you do this, you realize that’s the business. You don’t have total control over what an audience will respond to. It’s a crapshoot. You just want to keep working.” ◽