After years of playing various cops on screen, 65-year-old actor Jerry O’Donnell is ready to stop pretending.
O’Donnell has appeared in nearly 50 movies and shows throughout his four-decade acting career, often portraying police officers in series like The Young and the Restless, NYPD Blue, NCIS, Bosch, and Dexter. But now, the actor is taking the steps to become a real-life law enforcement agent with the Asheville Police Department in North Carolina.
“I feel blessed and grateful to still have some ability, so you know, that's like a sense of purpose — to be of service,” O’Donnell told local outlet the Asheville Watchdog recently.
After months of rigorous classes and training, O’Donnell is pending officer status with APD as he undergoes Basic Law Enforcement Training with other cadets. The trainees will take their state test in January. If he passes, O’Donnell will graduate on January 30 and be sworn in in March. The entire process takes about a year.
The veteran actor opened up about the physical demands of the training and said that the cadets have to run up and down parking garages. He continued: “And then you do exercises — 15 air squats, run up another level. Do 50 push-ups, run up another level. Do 50 burpees.”
O’Donnell has completed physical training before: He spent four years in the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division before making his TV acting debut in The Flash in 1991. In addition to playing a cop on several shows over his time in the spotlight, O’Donnell appeared in four episodes of Mad Men as Elisabeth Moss’s brother-in-law, Gerry Respola, from 2008 to 2014.
However, after living in Los Angeles for years and working as an actor, O’Donnell said he was inspired to move to North Carolina and find a community-focused job after Hurricane Helene devastated the western part of the state last year. He told his wife that he wanted to become a police officer, but she insisted that Los Angeles was too dangerous a place to launch his career in law enforcement.
Rather than settling into retirement like many people his age, O’Donnell said he feels a sense of purpose in joining the force, even if it means he is much older than his fellow trainees.
“There’s no way to absolutely guarantee he’s the oldest cadet we’ve ever had, as the APD is currently celebrating 150 years, and our records only go back so far,” Asheville police spokesperson Rick Rice told The Independent. “But from the research I’ve done, I haven’t found anyone older than him.”
O’Donnell told Asheville Watchdog: “I always think when you slide into home at the end of your life, you want to be all used up... You know — dirty, scarred up, a little bloody, and spent.”
