15 years ago, a then-48-year-old Holt McCallany scored the bittersweet break of his acting career by winning the lead role of Patrick “Lights” Leary on the FX series Lights Out. I say bittersweet because while the role of a former champion boxer forced out of retirement due to financial constraints changed the course of McCallany’s career, the show only lasted a single season, despite effusively positive reviews. How McCallany came to Lights Out and how that single season played out is a story worth telling. I recently sat down with Holt McCallany to discuss what came before Lights Out, what happened during the show, and how his life has changed since.
Pre-Lights
Born on September 3, 1963, in New York City, McCallany’s father, Michael, was an Irish actor and a producer of the Tony Award-winning Borstal Boy, about an Irish boy living through “The Troubles” of his native country. McCallany’s mother, Julie Wilson, born in Omaha, NE, was a revered Broadway performer (earning a Tony nomination in 1989 for the musical, Legs Diamond). During his early life, McCallany and his younger brother (Michael) were sent to Dublin to receive a classical education, while both parents remained in New York to pursue stage work. McCallany’s parents divorced in 1969, a decision complicated by his father’s Irish citizenship and the boys’ location in Dublin.
Holt McCallany: My dad was a heavy drinker. My mother couldn’t take it anymore and decided she wanted to divorce my dad. In those days, you couldn’t get a divorce in Ireland; Ireland was a strictly Catholic country, and divorce did not become legal until 1993. My mom flew to Mexico, where you could get a divorce in about twenty minutes, and she divorced my dad.
Eventually, Holt and Michael McCallany settled with his maternal grandparents in Omaha, Nebraska, his mother’s birthplace. Holt first discovered his love of boxing there, long before the rise of the great five-weight-class champion Terence Crawford put the sport on the map in Omaha. His affinity for boxing would come through his brother (now deceased), who became a Golden Gloves champion in Nebraska.
McCallany: It’s not the same as winning it (the Golden Gloves) in Nebraska as it would be winning it in New York City, where you had a good chance to maybe go on to the Olympics, or to turn pro, but there were some tough guys (competing). It was at that point that I realized that I better start learning to fight myself because I can’t have my little brother kicking my a$s every day.
Despite being actors themselves, McCallany’s parents were not initially supportive of his desire to pursue work in their chosen field.
McCallany: I had certain regrets about my adolescence. I wanted to be a child actor, and my parents wanted me to finish school. I had a very close relationship with my mother. So, when I ran away from home, I went to L.A. I caused a lot of heartache for this woman who brought me into the world.
Making inroads in Hollywood was a round-by-round experience for McCallany. While boxing doesn’t have extra innings, McCallany’s journey to the mainstream was a long one, full of fits, starts, doubts, and determination. McCallany’s first on-screen role was a single episode on the long-running daytime soap opera, All My Children, playing a character named “Holt Wilson.” Minor credits in the films Creepshow 2, Shakedown, and After School, followed. 1989 would represent a step-up in class for McCallany with a supporting role in Brian DePalma’s deeply underrated Vietnam War film, Casualties of War, starring Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox. While shooting Casualties of War, McCallany learned a valuable lesson from Penn about preparation.
Holt McCallany: We were playing soldiers, and we always had an M16 on us, and you had to know that weapon inside and out. You had to be able to disassemble it and reassemble it. If it jammed out in the bush, you’d better be able to unjam it, because if you’re out in the jungle and you’ve got no weapon, then you’re dead. We would get the weapon disassembled, and then I was having trouble reassembling it. There would be a spring, and I would say, “I don’t know where the spring goes.” I said to Sean, “They didn’t give us enough time.” And he said to me, “Never, ever wait for a film company to train you for anything. Because they give you a week for something that takes a month, they give you a day for something that takes a week. And they give you a couple of hours for something that takes an entire afternoon. You get your training before you show up.” Whether you’re playing a wrestler in The Iron Claw or a boxer in Lights Out, or you’re playing a cop, whatever the role is. You are going to have to find out everything for yourself.
It was a lesson that would prove invaluable for McCallany. After small roles in two notable films, David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992) and Hal Hartley’s fondly reviewed 1994 indie The Amateur (starring the great French actress Isabelle Huppert), McCallany would gain his first role in a boxing-based production, playing Teddy Atlas in the 1995 HBO biopic, Tyson, with actor Michael Jai White playing the title character of “Iron Mike” Tyson, and George C. Scott as Tyson’s original trainer and father figure, Cus D’Amato.
Holt McCallany: There was a casting director named Natalie Hart, who called me, who knew I loved boxing. She said, they’re going to do a film about Mike Tyson for HBO, and we’d like you to come in and read for Kevin Rooney (Mike Tyson’s trainer from 1985-88). I didn’t think I could play Kevin. I don’t resemble Kevin Rooney. I saw Kevin very differently in my mind. I said to Natalie, I can’t play Kevin, but I could play Teddy Atlas. She said Teddy is only in one scene in the movie. I said, ” That’s okay, I’ll play Teddy Atlas for one scene.”
Meeting Teddy Atlas before shooting Tyson would prove to be essential not only for the making of Tyson, but for McCallany’s entire career since. McCallany and Atlas became fast friends, and the fabled trainer and color commentator would go on to become the boxing consultant for Lights Out. McCallany is currently working on a documentary about Teddy Atlas’s life and career. McCallany’s memories of that first meeting with Atlas, and the immediate aftermath, are sharp and clear in the way that one’s recall always is when referring back to the most important moments in one’s life.
Holt McCallany: I called Teddy Atlas, and I said, Mr. Atlas, I’m going to play you in a movie about Mike Tyson, and I’d love to meet you. He invited me down to his gym in New Jersey. He was training Michael Moorer for the fight against Evander Holyfield that made him the heavyweight champion of the world. He was also training a guy who called himself the “Future Champ,” a wild personality, and a very entertaining guy, named Shannon Briggs. I was hanging out at the gym, and Teddy invited me to his house to meet his wife, Elaine, and his children, Nicole and Teddy III. Elaine made dinner. I spent the evening talking to Teddy, and Teddy started telling me stories. Like the time he put a gun to Tyson’s head. When I relayed some of these stories to the director of Tyson (Uli Edel), he said, “This has to be in the movie.” Suddenly, my part grew from just one scene to multiple scenes, and it made an impact. It was the first film that I ever made in L.A.
For the next decade and a half, McCallany’s career continued to move forward in much the same manner as it had during his first ten years, with small roles in high-profile projects (including Jade, The Peacemaker, Fight Club, Three Kings, Men of Honor, Alpha Dog, Vantage Point, and The Perfect Getaway), but with no personal breakthrough.
‘Lights Out’
As fate would have it, I had occasion to interview the legendary casting director, Alexa Fogel (The Wire, True Detective, Ozark, Atlanta, Creed III) last year while covering the Virginia Film Festival as a journalist. Fogel was the casting director for Lights Out and one of the driving forces behind McCallany’s casting as Patrick “Lights” Leary.
Holt McCallany: It was Alexa. I don’t know if she remembers this. But many years ago, long before Lights Out, when I was just a young actor in New York and going in for auditions like everybody else, she said to me, “Holt, the guys who get the jobs are the guys who go to school on the material.” Teddy Atlas says a similar thing about being a fighter. “You don’t rise to the occasion; you sink to your level of preparation.” It is all about the preparation. And again, a call back to Sean Penn about not waiting for a film company to train you. I’d been training for years for this part.
As unlikely a choice as McCallany might have been for the lead in Lights Out, he proved to be the perfect choice. He’d been honing his craft as an actor for more than 25 years and had been attached to boxing for even longer. One could argue that a 48-year-old character actor who had been in the business for over half of his life without ever playing a lead would be a massive underdog to assume the role of Patrick Leary, but acting, like boxing, is always an underdog story. Many will try, few will advance.
Holt McCallany: I had trained with Teddy Atlas and with Mark Breland and with a lot of really talented boxers. I think that’s part of what helped me get the role of Patrick Leary. John Landgraf (then president of FX), who’s a very smart guy, and the people involved in the production wanted a guy who loved the sport and had some experience in it. I think I fit the bill. It was a kind of validation for me. It was proof that all the time I had spent studying the sport, watching fights, and training at Freddie Roach‘s gym and Gleason’s Gym paid off. I felt that I had earned the right to portray this character, and that fighters who would watch this show were going to believe me in this part and like what I brought to it. This was very important to me. Yes, I wanted the audience to like the show, of course, but in particular, I wanted the boxing community to like it.
With six months before the show’s filming began, McCallany further immersed himself in the world of boxing, training every day, taking an official fight, and, as Lights Out casting director Alexa Fogel stated, going to “school on the material.”
Holt McCallany: I knew immediately where I was going to be every single day: Gleason’s gym in Brooklyn. I was going to double down on everything I had already been doing. That was why I took an amateur fight for USA boxing. I’d done a lot of sparring. I was always fighting younger guys because that’s who was there. You don’t go into the gym and find a lot of 48-year-old boxers. You find guys in their twenties. But I wanted to test myself. I said to Bruce Silverglade, who was the owner of Gleason’s Gym, just do me one favor. Just make me the first fight of the night, because I don’t want to sit in the locker room and let my imagination run away with me. What if I get knocked out of the first round, and it’s gonna live on YouTube for the rest of my life? Let me just get it over with. He put me on dead last out of 19 fights. I said, Bruce, why’d you put me last? He said, ” Because you’re the main event!” How can I be the main event? It’s my first fight. But I won a decision, and I fought a tough guy. I got to have that experience. You can’t have the same experience. It’s never going to be identical, but you can have an experience that approximates what you have to portray, and that will inform you about what it’s like.
I have long held the opinion that while Rocky II may not have been a better film than Rocky, it was a more interesting one. Much of the first two-thirds of Rocky II focuses on what happens to a fighter after he leaves the ring. What skills does he have to use for the rest of his life once his time in the sport is over? So many fighters don’t know how to manage their money, whether they are champions or journeymen, and die broke. Rocky Balboa attempts to become a pitchman, but he’s not suited to it. He considers going back to working as a collector for loansharks. At the heart of Rocky II and Lights Out is the age-old issue for all athletes once they retire: Who am I without my sport? Patrick Leary faces money problems that drive him back into the ring, but as much as he doesn’t like the reason he has to return, he not-so-secretly looks forward to it. In the ring, he’s alive; he has meaning.
Holt McCallany: Part of what the show was about was identity. If your whole life has been defined by your ability to throw, slip, and take punches, and you become a world champion, who are you when you can’t do that anymore? Boxers don’t retire; they get retired by age, by promoters, or simply by physiological incapacity. Identity for a boxer is about understanding who you are in the ring. The adrenaline you get from that is very addictive. The thing that’s so inherently dramatic about the sport of boxing, and why it is so cinematic, is that the conflict is built into the equation. If cinema is about conflict, boxing is about direct conflict. When you go into that chamber of truth, you can lie to the press, you can lie to your family, you can even lie to yourself. But once you get in that ring, you are going to be faced with the truth, and you’re going to find out who you are. The hero and the coward feel exactly the same emotion. It’s how they choose to deal with it. That’s what makes them different.
Once shooting began, Holt McCallany found himself at the center of a major television production with actors like Catherine McCormack as his wife Theresa (Braveheart, 28 Weeks Later, and the excellent boxing-themed series, A Thousand Blows), Pablo Schreiber as his brother and manager (The Wire, Den of Thieves, Orange is the New Black), Elizabeth Marvel (Fargo, House of Cards, Homeland) as his sister, Ryann Shane (Frances Ha, Banshee) as his pensive middle daughter, and the great Stacy Keach (Fat City, American History X, Jay Kelly) as his father and trainer, all supporting him. McCallany was (and is) keenly aware of what it meant to be surrounded by such talent.
Holt McCallany: Catherine is a very intelligent, very talented actress. I also found her to be extraordinarily beautiful. I remember seeing her for the first time in Braveheart. It was impossible not to fall in love with Catherine to a certain degree. She was very adept at not simply playing a nagging housewife. She is a woman (training to be a doctor) who wants the best for her husband and for her family, and she is better positioned than anyone else to understand what the risks are. I’m very grateful to them. I still have a lifelong friendship with Pablo Schreiber. I go to see Liz Marvel when she’s on stage in New York. Ryann and I have stayed in contact over the years, and I adore her.
In the case of Stacy Keach, there was no way Keach’s lead role in the all-time great boxing film, Fat City, directed by the remarkable John Huston, wasn’t going to be referenced. It was not difficult for either of us to make the connection between Lights Out and Fat City, even down to an almost identical line of dialogue.
Holt McCallany: I admired this guy (Keach) going all the way back to Fat City, one of the greatest boxing films of all time. There’s that famous line that he says to Jeff Bridges. He says, “Does anybody care what I think?”
At that point, I interjected. Late in the only season of Lights Out, everyone stands around Patrick Leary discussing what his future should hold. Leary speaks up and says, “Does anyone wanna know what I think?” The parallel line that connects Fat City to Lights Out sparked a conversation about the dark side of “the loneliest sport,” which Keach’s film and McCallany’s series fearlessly illuminated.
Holt McCallany: I think this might be unique to the sport of boxing, where everybody makes decisions on the fighter’s behalf, including the manager, including the promoter, the sanctioning bodies, there is the trainer, there are all these people around the fighter. What is the fighter meant to do? Just train and face whoever they put in front of me. That is the cruel nature of boxing. You get your brief moment to dance under the lights, but you’re gonna leave part of yourself in that ring, in the form of blood and tissue.
The subversion of a fighter’s best interests is most obviously exemplified in Lights Out by the late Reg E. Cathey as the flamboyant and duplicitous promoter, Barry K. Word. Cathey gives an astonishing performance that swings from high to low without ever getting too cartoonish or too obviously villainous. Word has charm and deviousness in equal measure. There is no question as to why Word has excelled in a field where snakes slither and leave no trail. Before the title fight that ends the season and the series, Word argues with Leary about the table he has set, and all the delicacies that cover it. Leary responds to Word’s argument of self-worth with a line that McCallany delivers with a mixture of weariness and steel, “And if a crumb falls off your table, God help the ant who tries to eat it.”
Holt McCallany: It is a great line. I’m not sure who wrote it, so I’m going to give credit to my showrunner, Warren Leight. It encapsulates the ecosystem that is the sport of boxing. It’s like a pyramid, and there’s glamor at the top, and there’s desperation at the bottom. Reg E. Cathey’s character personifies that. He’s accustomed to all of these people waiting for table scraps. Reg decides what they deserve. There was a very famous prosecutor (John K. Carroll), a New York guy from the Southern District, who prosecuted all of those Wall Street tycoons like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken for insider trading and junk bonds. He was once asked, “Who was the most difficult witness he ever cross-examined?” And he said, without question, Don King. King was so clever, and he says a hundred different things except the answer to the question that you asked him. For me, Reg was channeling that energy; may he rest in peace. He was a wonderful actor and a really special guy. I really loved having him as a part of our cast. He managed to, in that same way that King does, to somehow, against all odds, still be likable on a certain level. Even though King had done such terrible things to so many fighters, Don would make the argument that he made more millionaires out of fighters than any promoter in history, but he also robbed a lot of the guys, too.
Part of what made Lights Out so compelling was that, as much as crooked promoters focused on how to make a buck off the blood and sweat of the fighters they put into the ring, family could be just as nefarious as the suits running the sport. A constant theme of Lights Out is the often unspoken battle between the family Leary created with his wife, which included three daughters, and the one he was born into, composed of his father and two siblings. That battle plays out most painfully when Leary brings in a new trainer, Ed Romeo (played by the brilliant Eamonn Walker), and briefly shuts out his birth family, who have designs of their own regarding the direction of Patrick’s boxing career. Romeo connects with Leary’s wife and children, becoming a surrogate uncle to Leary’s three daughters and a trusted confidant to Leary’s wife. But in the end, blood wins out over judgment, and Leary breaks his promise to Romeo, leading to a crushing breakdown sequence, played to the hilt by Walker. Patrick Leary is not a bad man, but in the search for his own good, he often comes up wanting, and collateral damage occurs along the way.
Holt McCallany: Eamonn gave one of my favorite performances on the whole show, and we have remained friends. I was shooting a series in Chicago a couple of years ago, and Eamonn was also on a show there (Chicago Fire). I made it a point to seek him out and get together to reminisce about our time on Lights Out, because I loved working with him. He brought so much to that character. One of the regrets I have is that (producers) Warren Leight and Brian Goluboff confided in me some of the ideas they were toying with in the event that we did get a renewal. One of them was this notion that now that “Lights” has his belt back, he’s going to get seduced by the money on the table. The old rule in boxing is that when the money is on the table, you better grab it. I go against my wife. I go against the advice of the people in my family who have my best interest at heart, and I decide I’m going to continue my career in the ring. Meanwhile, Eamonn’s character is training a young power-punching monster, and there was going to be a collision between me and Romeo’s fighter, in which “Lights” was going to get a lesson in reality. I thought that would’ve been a very interesting storyline to explore, and it would’ve really expanded Eamonn’s character. I thought Eamonn was a tremendous asset to the show.
The 13th and final episode of Lights Out culminates with a championship fight between “Lights” Leary and his nemesis, “Death Row” Reynolds (played by the dynamic Billy Brown). Their relationship is a fascinating one. While they have serious intent to hurt one another in the ring, and while no one would confuse them for friends, they are in an exclusive club where only the members truly understand one another. They know where each other lives, they’ve been in each other’s houses, and they know the names of their wives and children. Boxing is a strange and bruising fraternity.
Holt McCallany: Billy Brown isn’t just one of my favorite actors; he’s one of my favorite people in the business. When I had my 60th birthday party at Musso and Frank, Billy was there, and so was Pablo Schreiber. I’d like to see Billy get wider recognition, because he really deserves it. My favorite fighter, if you go back historically, was an Irish boxer from New York named Gene Tunney. He was often referred to as the thinking man’s heavyweight champion. He was educated. He had a friendship with George Bernard Shaw. He became wealthy. He was erudite. He was the first heavyweight to really understand how to work off the jab and stay on the outside and move. The fights he had with Jack Dempsey, the story of the long count, it’s all boxing lore for the history buffs. Why am I talking about two boxers from a hundred years ago? Because Jack Dempsey always fought with this sort of rage that made other fighters feel like this guy wants to kill me. This is not a boxing match; this is like an execution. But when Dempsey was asked about his opponents, he said, I don’t hate those guys. Those guys are like me. Those are the guys who have the courage to get in there and face adversity and try to achieve some kind of destiny for themselves. The guys I dislike are the corrupt promoters, the leeches, and the guys who try to cheat fighters out of their purses. I hate the guys who take advantage of fighters, not the guy who has the courage to get in the ring.
The notion of what a second season of Lights Out might have looked like is a painful one, as are the details of the show’s cancellation. Despite terrific reviews and a small but devoted following, FX canceled the show for the most obvious of reasons: ratings.
Holt McCallany: In 2011, when the show came out, the networks were still calculating viewership based upon what we used to call appointment television. Meaning they only counted those who sat down on Tuesday night at 10:00 PM and watched your show. We found ourselves getting beaten in the ratings by shows I had never heard of. And I was like, what the heck is this? But people were watching, either online or by DVR. Not long after we were canceled, the networks finally determined that they were gonna have to calculate the ratings differently. People wanted to be able to watch shows at their convenience. The bar in those days (for a cable series) was 2 million viewers a week. That’s what you had to be doing. It doesn’t sound like a huge number, but we were just under it. But including people who watched the reruns, those who watched it online, or those who watched it on DVR, we were well above that number. We were above 3.5 (million) if memory serves. I think if the same show had come out a couple of years later, we would have gotten a renewal. Television is about advertising. It’s about how much the network can sell those 30-second ads for. When it’s a numbers game like that, it can be as cruel as the sport of boxing. There was also some confusion in the marketplace at the time of its release because Mark Wahlberg and David O. Russell’s incredible film, The Fighter, for which both Christian Bale and Melissa Leo won Academy Awards, was out. That movie got released at the same time that Lights Out premiered. People would stop me at airports and say, “Man, I just saw your movie The Fighter, and you were great.” And I would say thank you, except I’m not in that movie. I’m in a TV show about a fighter, and it’s called Lights Out. That happened to me on multiple occasions.
At the end of the final episode of Lights Out, a bloodied and battered Patrick Leary comes out of the locker room in a confused state. His wife finds him, and Leary turns to her and asks, “Who won?” Those two words serve as the final line of dialogue in the show’s history. As such, few series have ever ended on a bolder, more painful note.
Holt McCallany: It’s one of the most poignant moments of the whole show. What I’m gonna argue is that who won or who lost isn’t always black and white. I think that what Patrick Leary is saying in that final moment of Lights Out is that you knowingly leave part of yourself in the ring. Why do I have to risk myself when I know I already have early-onset CTE? Is it ego? Is it financial? Is it a necessity? Because even if you win the fight, what did you lose? What did you leave behind?
Post-Lights
What’s also true is that sometimes when you lose, you win. Sure, Lights Out didn’t get renewed, but compensations did abound. McCallany proved he could carry a show on his own back. He made lifelong friends. The boxing community embraced the series. Fighters such as Paulie Malignaggi and John Duddy appeared on the show. Joe Frazier, Larry Holmes, and Mickey Ward came to the Lights Outpremiere. Not long after Lights Out was off the air, McCallany found that he had reached a new status: He didn’t have to audition anymore. The work that came to him wasn’t just high quality, but his parts became bigger. He has gone on to work with Michael Mann (Blackhat), Liam Neeson (Run All Night), Will Smith (Concussion), Clint Eastwood and Tom Hanks (Sully), Tom Cruise (Jack Reacher: Never Go Back and Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning), Guillermo del Toro (Nightmare Alley), and played a lead in two Netflix series, The Waterfront and, of course, David Fincher’s instant classic, Mindhunter. But as much as all of that means to McCallany, two things mean even more.
Holt McCallany: My mother was still alive, and she was living with me when we were filming Lights Out. One of the most gratifying things about doing that show was that it was the first time in my career that I really felt I had achieved a small measure of success. It was the lead role. The show was built around me. It was about a sport that I love. My mother got to see that and come to the set to watch some of my big fight scenes. I was so grateful that she got to live with me for the last ten years of her life because she had a stroke and was very fragile. I had struggled as an actor for many years. But at least she got to witness Lights Out. I remember when I had to tell Teddy Atlas that the show was canceled. I knew how disappointed he would be for me. He said to me, ” Listen, Holt. Here’s what you showed. You showed that you belong. Sometimes, even in defeat, a fighter can get in the ring and give a performance that exceeds people’s expectations. Even if he didn’t get the decision, what he showed was that he belongs in there. That’s what you proved. You proved that you belonged in there.”
Sometimes when you lose, you win.
Lights Out.
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