Ed O'Neill

[HBBrock]

Posted: 12/23/15 at 12:08am

A friend recently told me that Ed O'Neill did a radio version of a View From The Bridge and was great.

This got me thinking.....why hasn't he done plays in NYC? He would be a big draw, and I bet he would be excellent.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 12/23/15 at 12:13am

It's probably changed, especially with Modern Family being what is most known for these days,  but I think during the post-Married with Children era it was hard for him to be taken seriously. I remember reading something back in the day about him being cut from some movie where he played a judge or something. As the story went, every time he'd appear on screen test audiences would snicker, presumably because it was funny to see Al Bundy try to be serious. 

Updated On: 12/23/15 at 12:13 AM

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 12/23/15 at 12:21am

He has had the luxury of doing 2 long running tv shows

 

In between, he did a reboot of Dragnet which bombed. Early on, he did a pilot for a tv show that did not sell. It was a tv version of the French Connection cop Popeye Doyle

 

He was not that bad in it.

[themysteriousgrowl]

Posted: 12/23/15 at 7:36am

 

My memory on this is a little vague, but I recall seeing some kind of “Behind the Music”-type show about “Married… with Children” where the writers/producers said they’d gotten the whole show cast but couldn’t find their Al Bundy.  They’d seen “every guy in town” or something like that.  Then one of them remembered seeing Ed O’Neill in a play in LA and thought it was one of the best stage performances he’d ever seen.  So they sent him a script.  As their story goes, he showed up to the audition with the character fully formed, and the second he walked in the door, they knew they’d found their Al.

 

It puts me in mind of Jim Varney.  People who saw him onstage when he was young said he might (and should) have become one of the finest Shakespearean actors of his generation, given the chance.  But then he developed the Ernest P. Worrell character and his career never quite got out from underneath it.