Tim Matheson, Actor 
Behind the Scenes 
Film
Whereabouts Known
San Antonian Bruce McGill has worked steadily since appearing in 1978’s Animal House; so why don’t we know his name? Such is the life of a character actor.
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The 31-day shoot of Animal House on the University of Oregon campus in Eugene was a seminal experience for McGill. Besides the high visibility of the project (which he still calls “the gift of life”), he made important professional connections; the director, John Landis, would later cast him as Michelle Pfeiffer’s brother in Into the Night. He made personal connections too: He still counts fellow actors Matheson, Riegert, and James Widdoes among his friends. The Bruce McGill who materialized each day on the set seems from all accounts to have been an intense thespian. Although it was only his second film, he was one of the more accomplished actors around. But he was also a Texas wild man. “His room at the Roadway Inn, where we stayed, became party central,” Landis recalls. “I’m not sure how, but he got a piano in there. He was the king of the party monsters—much more so than Belushi.” Matheson remembers that in the days before filming started, some of the cast met up with a few sorority girls and went to a frat party for “research.” The local Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter didn’t take kindly to their arrival, however, and a brawl ensued that left McGill with a black eye and Widdoes in a dentist’s chair at eight on a Sunday morning to repair a broken tooth.
Despite the off-camera high jinks, the movie came together just fine, and McGill had a toehold in Hollywood. At the time, he was living in New York in an apartment on the Upper West Side that he would keep for sixteen years, but when he took a part in Delta House, the short-lived TV sequel to Animal House, he began to spend more time in Los Angeles. On the set of MacGyver in the late eighties, he met his future wife, Gloria, who was an assistant director on the show. In 1989 they moved out to L.A. for good.
His life today is a much quieter one. He answers the door to his unassuming but spacious house in Mar Vista (not far from Marina Del Rey) in bare feet, shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt. He’s shorter than you might expect from having seen him onscreen, and his eyes have a piercing quality that suggests pent-up energy. The public areas of the house are spare and clean, and McGill’s love of music is evident in the grand player piano and the six guitars that lean against a wall. In the back yard, next to the pool and a blooming avocado tree, stands McGill’s office, a small structure that he calls “an extension of my mind.” When he’s not on a set, he spends a great deal of time there, reading scripts at his desk and poring over his stock portfolio. The walls and shelves are strewn with memorabilia, including the hat worn by his recurring character on MacGyver and cartoon strips that refer to Animal House.
The Hawaiian shirt, it turns out, is standard dress in the McGill household (“Unless it’s a coat-and-tie affair,” he says, “why bother?”). He remembers first being introduced to the pleasures of tropical-print fabric while guest-starring on Miami Vice. Since then, the Hawaiian shirt has been his default garment as well as the iconic embodiment of his dream for the next phase of his life: to move to one of the islands and open a business after about five more years of solid acting. “I won’t quit acting,” he says, “but I’d like to get to the point where I don’t have to beat the bushes so hard.”
Indeed, the life of the character actor is often unenviably busy. McGill still hustles around town on auditions and is not always sure what his next job will be. “There’s a misconception that once they’ve seen you in a movie, especially if it’s a hit like Animal House, your life is easy, you’re sitting back reading scripts,” he says. “But acting is a selling job, and at the moment, it’s a buyer’s market—there are more people in it than ever before.”
McGill says he longs for choice parts that don’t just pay the bills but allow him to display his acting ability. He played one such part this summer: a tough trial lawyer named Ron Motley in Man of the People, the upcoming Michael Mann film about the tobacco industry’s smear campaign against a whistle-blower. McGill is clearly proud because the film is high-minded and will likely get wide exposure—it is based on a Vanity Fair article by San Antonio native Marie Brenner and stars Al Pacino, Russell Crowe, and Christopher Plummer—but it’s also a showcase for his talent. Motley “is a great character,” Brenner says. “He’s funny, a showman and a good ol’ boy. You couldn’t make a mistake in playing the role flamboyantly.” That’s just what McGill did: For an over-the-top courtroom speech, he went all the way back to his theater training to find just the right vocal range. “Historically, the great supporting actors could sing and dance and play an instrument,” John Landis says. “They could do drama, and they could do comedy. Now these kids coming up just don’t have the chops. Bruce has a tremendous background in the theater, and I think it shows.”
Though McGill insists he doesn’t ask for anything more than what he’s got, you can hear in the way he talks about the business a certain ruefulness that suggests he knows he deserves better and bigger parts. “Auditioning is tough; rejection is tough,” he says. “You’re selling yourself, and it’s harder in a way than selling vacuum cleaners because when you’re turned down, it’s easy to take it personally.” Eventually, he’d like to limit himself to a few select projects along the lines of the Michael Mann film and hone a reputation for serious acting in serious parts much like that of his idol, Anthony Hopkins. That attitude, James Widdoes says, “is probably the sign of mental health in someone of Bruce’s talent. If he didn’t want to show it off in better parts, I don’t think he’d be as good as he is.”
“Early in my movie career I saw John Belushi spin off into oblivion,” McGill says, “and with that, any dreams of being a Time magazine cover—type star went out the window. I’m very happy with my place in the business, and I’ve enjoyed the challenge of just trying to live a somewhat stable life in this crazy world.” Anyway, there’s always Hawaii.
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