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To hear Holt McCallany reel off his childhood heroes is to understand him a little better. “Steve McQueen, Burt Lancaster, Bob Mitchum, Gene Hackman, Jack Palance,” the actor says. “I loved Jack Palance. Lee Marvin. Charles Bronson.” He recites each name with cinematic gravitas and through semi-pursed lips as though he’s balancing an invisible cigarette out the corner of his mouth. “Those guys, they had this classic American… masculinity.”
The same can and has been said of McCallany, who at 61 has carved a career out of that same strong, silent archetype. He’s played parts on both sides of the law, including one tough guy unironically named Bullet. Bit parts in early David Fincher films like Alien 3 and Fight Club introduced him as an excellent character actor, “that guy!” audiences are always happy to see, even if they may not know his name.
Fincher not only had his name, he had McCallany’s number, believing from the get-go that he was destined for bigger things, and eventually casting him as a lead in Mindhunter – the critically acclaimed Netflix neo-noir series about the FBI and serial killers. His performance as the straight-shooting, flat-top agent Bill Tench was so lauded, it inspired a think piece in Vulture titled: “Why Mindhunter’s Bill Tench Is So Lovable.” That article got to the crux also of what makes McCallany so, if not lovable, then watchable, because hand-in-hand with that stone-cold hardiness is an unexpected sensitivity. Flashes of openness where you’d expected a door slammed shut.
But McCallany downplays his part in the show’s success, attributing it instead to “the creative genius” behind the camera. He compares his role to that of a guest at a lavish dinner party: “There’s gorgeous tablecloths, beautiful crystal glasses, and delicious food. You just have to not spill food down your shirt and everybody goes, bravo!” It may sound like false humility, but in truth, there is a steely confidence to McCallany’s words: give him a good part, and he’ll do the rest.
Mindhunter opened more doors: doors that had other doors and windows behind them. He hasn’t had to audition since, which is, he reminds me, a big deal for someone who’s had to audition for every part in the 25 years before that. It was after watching the series that director Sean Durkin tapped McCallany to play the troubled patriarch of the Von Erich wrestling family in The Iron Claw. The awards chatter around his volcanic performance never materialised, but it was plain to see McCallany was due his moment.
Enter The Waterfront – his second lead role and venture with Netflix. Unlike Mindhunter, though, this series is more Netflix-coded: meaning soapy, silly and a great deal of fun. McCallany plays tough guy Harlan, head of the powerful Buckley family who preside over the sunny coastal town of Havenport. When the family biz runs into trouble, Harlan must regress to his shady drug-dealing past, triggering a tug-of-war with his reluctant son and apparent heir Cane (Jake Weary).
Among other questions, The Waterfront asks what it means to be a man. Harlan finds his kill-or-be-killed caveman mentality upended by Cane, who is more sensitive. Does McCallany think the show is saying something about masculinity in America? “Masculinity in America…” he repeats after me, as if seeing a film title in the making. “Wow, yeah it’s true that it is one of the things that I’m interested in exploring.”
For what it’s worth, McCallany seems to cleave closer to Harlan than Cane. His physicality plays into this, obviously – he is tall and broad, two things I can attest to even just seeing him in a desk chair over Zoom. His pale blue eyes are deep set, and he’s got a mean Clint-esque squint about him. His name itself connotes robustness perhaps because of its phonetic proximity to macho words like colt (meaning a male horse or an Old West revolver) and bolt (as in a metal screw). There’s an old-fashioned courtesy, too, in the way he repeats my name when answering questions.
“Chivalry is not dead for me,” McCallany says at one point. And that is, in no small part, down to his Irish mother who had more influence on her son than all the actors in the world. “God rest her soul, she was the person I loved most in the world,” he says. “She raised me to be a gentleman and that very much included things like opening a door for a lady, or pulling out her chair for her, and giving up a seat for an elderly person.” There are times he mourns the old way of life. “I feel we’ve lost a bit of that respect and elegance, which is a shame.” He’d never dream of taking a woman out on a date and going halves, he tells me. “My mother would’ve berated me for trying to split the bill with a lady.”
When his mother grew sick years ago, McCallany moved her into his studio loft bachelor pad in Tribeca. “A very impractical space to share with an elderly person,” he laughs. “But I didn’t want to put her into any kind of assisted living.” The two were close. There’s a video online of them singing cheek-to-cheek at the LA establishment The Gardenia. Before her death, they’d go out for dinner every week in Manhattan and she’d make him wear a jacket and tie. “I’d be the only guy in some little pizzeria wearing a tie,” he says. “But I didn’t care because she was happy. She had an old-fashioned notion about how gentlemen should conduct themselves and even though my father didn’t always live up to those things, she certainly instilled them in me.”
McCallany grew up between New York and Kildare, Ireland. His dad, a big believer in the traditional Irish schooling system, sent him to Catholic boarding school where he was regularly beaten by the priests in charge for being a “wise ass” before he was eventually expelled. (We don’t have time to get into it, but McCallany has previously said his role as The Mechanic in Fight Club was “cathartic” because it involved beating up a priest, which goes some way in shedding light on how he reflects on his time there.)
Performance was in his blood. His mother was a well-known cabaret singer at La Maisonette, a nightclub frequented by Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, and his father, an actor and producer best known for a Tony-winning production of Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy about the IRA. To give you an idea of the kind of people his parents were, McCallany has two stories: the first is about his mum who, fed up with his alcoholic father and the 10 drinking buddies he brought from the bar one night, flung the record player out of the window before going back to bed.
In the scene, I have to rape Sigourney Weave and I was nervous about that because I was a young actor at the time with no resumé and Sigourney was the highest paid actresses in Hollywood
The second is about his father (“not the kind of man to ever change diapers, but that’s just how it was back then”) and that tale goes back to his birth. His mother was in hospital while his father was a couple of blocks away watching the Jets at an Irish pub. He popped over and happened to arrive minutes before the birth of his first son. Up until his death, he said: “I knew that Holt would be a good guy because he had the class to be born at halftime.” Like all boys, McCallany worshipped his dad, whether or not he deserved it. “My father was a man who possessed all of those qualities we were talking about. He was a hero to me yet he was also a very heavy drinker and a guy who had deeply-held political views that I no longer share.”
When he was 14 and living back in New York, McCallany hopped on a Greyhound bus to LA to pursue his dreams of acting. When his dad eventually tracked him down, McCallany was not treading the boards as planned but unloading trucks in a factory job. He was sent packing back to Ireland. It was only after graduating high school that McCallany was allowed to make a proper go of it. His big screen break came in the early Nineties when he was offered the role of Junior in Fincher’s Alien 3 – a role he initially turned down.
Fincher’s first ever film was a notoriously troubled production, plagued so badly by studio interference that the director famously disowned it. It makes the movie a somewhat tricky topic to broach with certain actors, but not McCallany, who answers every question, no matter how mundane, in large blocks of text that can run up to seven minutes each. You’d think it was an avoidance tactic were he not equally loquacious on other more knotty subjects – likely to the alarm of his publicist.
“I’ll tell you absolutely everything,” he says about Alien 3. His girlfriend at the time was reluctant to let him leave for five months just to shoot one scene – a scene they both worried would damage his career: “In it, I have to rape Sigourney Weave and I was nervous about that because I was a young actor at the time with no resumé and Sigourney was the highest paid actresses in Hollywood.”
So he said no, only for Fincher to call him up at home. “He goes, ‘No, I’m going to use you in lots of scenes, man! Forget about what you’re reading in the script. I have ideas for your character,’” says McCallany, putting on the filmmaker’s California accent. And so he agreed. “It was that easy and true to his word, David used me constantly throughout the film.” When Alien 3 was released, though, his scenes (except for the rape one) ended up on the cutting room floor with much else. “That was very disappointing for David. But then he did Se7en and that was such an extraordinary piece of work that he never had that problem again.”
Incidentally, Fincher had wanted McCallany for a small part in Se7en, but the timing was wrong. Likewise for Panic Room with Jodie Foster; McCallany was meant to play the young cop. “Not to be spewing clichés but the most important thing is not how long it takes a man to get to his destination, but that he got there,” he says now – on the cusp of his directorial debut, a remake of the 1995 Italian film The Star Maker. He even got the Fincher stamp of approval. “He really seemed to respond to the material and gave me a lot of time and helped refine the script,” says McCallany. After 30 years working with Fincher, it’s a full-circle moment worthy of the screen.
All episodes of ‘The Waterfront’ are available to watch on Netflix now
