, where Jack McGee, who plays Chief Jerry Reilly blasts writer and star Denis Leary (who plays Tommy Gavin). Reilly, whose character committed suicide in episode three of the fourth season, takes issue with the decision to kill off his character while Peter Tolan, Leary's co-writer/producer gives an entirely different account. It's got some great insight into the inner workings of the set and some juicy gossip. Highly recommended reading.
Jack McGee wants to talk.
The 59-year-old former firefighter and veteran character actor played firehouse chief Jerry Reilly for three seasons on FX's controversial hit series Rescue Me, acting opposite star and executive producer Denis Leary as part of one the most colorful ensembles on television. The show's macho melodrama -- largely co-scripted by Leary and his main collaborator, Peter Tolan -- has followed the blustering Reilly learning to understand and accept his gay son, coping with his beloved wife's Alzheimer's diagnosis, and recovering from a heart attack.
After all that, he blows his brains out, in the final seconds of the show's June 27 episode.
The character's suicide occurs after a series of epiphanies. Reilly makes a heartfelt toast at his son's wedding to another man. But he also fails a physical exam required to resume work at the firehouse, then grudgingly accepts a desk job in the Fire Department of New York's administrative headquarters, where he helps Leary's character, screw-up firefighter Tommy Gavin, quash documents implicating him on arson charges. In the final minutes of McGee's last episode, Reilly goes to the firehouse to inform Gavin that he's saved Gavin's bacon yet again, and is given a surprise going-away party and a set of golf clubs. Then he goes home and shoots himself.
McGee says the character's exit didn't make sense. "Tell me, how does the only guy [on the series], the guy who always does the right thing, a stand-up guy with all the other guys, the guy everybody goes to when they have a problem, the guy who stood by his wife after she developed Alzheimer's, go off and take his life?" McGee asked in a phone interview from the set of a film shoot in Hawaii.
Is Reilly's suicide understandable, considering how much the character loved fighting fires? McGee says the character might have considered suicide after losing his dream job, but he wouldn't have followed through, because he was a tough, adaptable man with a wife who depended on him. "My own true feeling is, I think the wrong character killed himself," McGee says, referring to Gavin.
Beyond that, McGee objects to his treatment by Leary: "I want to walk away from this as clean as possible, but I'm not gonna sugarcoat it."
McGee says that Leary, who declined requests to be interviewed for this piece, cultivates a public image as a bold, blunt, hands-on actor-writer-producer who loves collaboration, but is actually an insecure, controlling person who hogs the spotlight. ("The promos are all him -- you'd think there was nobody else on the show.") McGee also says Leary demands deference from costars, ostracizes those who don't grant it, and avoids taking responsibility for unpleasant creative decisions, preferring to subcontract the delivery of bad news to his fellow executive producers, Peter Tolan and Jim Serpico.
"He's a bully, is what he is," McGee says. "Bullies most of the time don't have the guts to do things themselves."
Asked if he can recall any other actors being written out under circumstances similar to his, McGee mentions Dean Winters, who played Tommy Gavin's cop brother, Johnny, a character who was shot dead last season. McGee speculates that Leary had him written out "because Dean didn't kiss his ass."
McGee says Leary began marginalizing him (McGee, not Winters) without explanation during the production of Season Three. After the hiatus between Seasons Three and Four, two days before Christmas, Tolan informed McGee that he and Leary had decided to kill off McGee's character. McGee says that although the news angered and depressed him, he accepted it.
But McGee adds that in the spring of 2007, during production of the last three episodes in which he appears, Leary avoided speaking to him when they weren't acting in a scene together, and that after the conclusion of McGee's last scene, the star walked away from the set without saying a word to McGee. He says Leary never talked with him about his termination, and let Tolan and co-executive producer Jim Serpico handle it. And McGee was not invited to the fourth-season premiere in New York City last month.
"I never got an explanation [for why Reilly was written out]," McGee continues. "I worked with Denis for three years and change. Then he walked away from it and never said a word to me. Not that he said much to me in the year before that. I guess I wound up in his doghouse. I'm not here to character-assassinate him. If I knew why this happened, I would tell you in a minute, 'I fucked up.' And that's the truth of it."
McGee says he can recall only two complaints from Leary about his work -- a reprimand for bringing guests to the set without asking permission from the show's production office, and a note about his body language, delivered secondhand by Tolan.
"Tolan said that Denis had a problem with my moving my head in a certain way. I said, 'Are you fucking kidding me? Tell the director to tell me and I'll stop doing it. It made George Clooney a million dollars.' I laughed about it with Peter.'"
McGee says he isn't surprised that Leary never had a face-to-face discussion with him about the decision to write him out, because "that would take a real man to do that. Denis doesn't know how to do that. His persona would make you think he's straight-up, he's honest and he's forthright. But I never got an indication of that. The truth is, if he knocked on my door right now, I'd be able to look him right in the eye. I don't know if he could do that."
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Peter Tolan has a different version of events.
Tolan, who has been Leary's co-writer and co-producer since the short-lived but critically acclaimed ABC cop series The Job, says, "Jack is being disingenuous if he says nobody explained to him what was going on. The difference he's drawing is, apparently he wanted to hear [the bad news] from Denis, when the fact remains that Denis is wearing about eight different hats on the show and doesn't have anything to do with the hiring and firing of actors."
Asked to justify Reilly's death from a dramatic standpoint, Tolan says it was about violating audience expectations. He refers to the third-season episode in which Reilly suffered a heart attack and Johnny got shot three times in the back.
"Last season, we realized we were gonna kill Johnny in one episode," Tolan said. "What we wanted to do was throw the audience off a little bit. We wanted to make it a bit more jarring than it would be otherwise. We wanted to have Jack have a heart attack -- 'Oh, my God, is he dead on the floor or not?' -- and then go to Johnny being killed. It was a one-two punch. The audience is thinking, 'Oh, my God, they're gonna kill two people in one [episode]."
And then they didn't. Johnny died, but the chief lived.
Then, during the hiatus between seasons, Tolan and Leary "decided thematically what the fourth season was gonna be. It's about loss for these firefighters over time, because of their difficulty maintaining relationships with families and friends that have nothing to do with their jobs. They really have no lives without their jobs. We said, 'Let's do The Ghost of Christmas Future [from A Christmas Carol]. Let's see what the future is going to be like for Tommy and these guys if they don't change their ways. We had to have that affect a member of the crew. We decided that crewmember would be Jerry Reilly. One of the things we threw out was, 'Maybe he fails the physical [and] he kills himself.' As soon as we came up with that, we said, 'That's what we're gonna do.'"
While Tolan insists Reilly's demise had "very little to do with Jack McGee and everything to do with the fact that Rescue Me is a dark show," he adds that McGee's stint as series regular was not trouble-free. "Yes, yes, he made errors. Not just inviting people to the set, but bringing them into Denis's trailer when Denis was trying to relax or not working... But Denis doesn't hold grudges. Denis says, 'Let's not have it happen again,' and then he moves on."
As for McGee's feeling that he was shut out by Leary and the rest of the cast for no discernible reason, Tolan says, "There's not a shutting out. But you can, by your own behavior, shut yourself out for [other] people."
Asked for an example, Tolan recalled the shooting of one scene that ended with McGee telling another actor, "That thing you're doing? You shouldn't do it anymore." The actor told McGee, "Fuck you -- it's not your job to tell me how to act."
Tolan declined to name the actor or say when the incident occurred.
Most damningly, Tolan says that after being informed of his character's impending death, McGee threatened not to return for filming of the fourth season.
Tolan says that after delivering the bad news, he urged McGee to "take the high road... What he did then was threaten not to come back for the [new] season at all. He put us all in a bad situation, and by that act, fouled the waters that had come before. If he wasn't asked back [to the premiere] it may have been because of that one thing... After I told him to take the high road, then to be treated to this -- I found it a little difficult to take."
McGee denies that he ever threatened to walk off the show. "Never, never did I threaten to not come back to the show for the beginning of Season Four. Whether it is Peter Tolan or Jim Serpico -- who were the only ones I spoke to at that time -- who said that this is what happened, [they] were either misinformed or misled by someone else."
McGee cops to bringing guests to meet Leary in his trailer, and to offering unsolicited notes to a costar -- the unnamed actor in Tolan's anecdote, says McGee, is Steven Pasquale, who plays Sean Garrity. "That occurred in the middle of the first season, and within a day or two following that conversation, I apologized to Steve Pasquale and told him I was out of line, and that he was brilliant at what he was doing, and he accepted, and appreciated my acknowledging my putting my foot in my mouth. That was almost two and a half years ago."
As for the trailer incident, "I took responsibility [and] acknowledged that it was wrong to do. This happened at the beginning of the second season, and not once after it was brought to my attention did I invite anyone to the set."
"Denis and Peter gave me the opportunity to play a role of a lifetime, and for that I'll always be grateful," McGee concludes. "Yes, I made mistakes, and I've learned a lot from the whole experience. I wish them all the best in the future. All this he-said-she-said is nothing but firehouse washwoman bullshit. It really reminds me of the New York fire department kitchen... I'm actually happy to be away from 'The Brilliant Bully.'"
Tolan disputes that description of Leary. He says McGee's suggestion that Dean Winters was written out of the series for failing to kiss up to Leary is "hearsay, because Dean never said anything to me. I did hear from a second party that Dean was not exactly happy that he was being written out. But I never heard that it was specifically aimed at anybody. He liked the show, he liked the part, he was sorry to see it end. He never spoke to me, but I only heard anecdotally that he was kind of upset that it was done. It was never anything about Denis." Winters did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Tolan adds that it would be a mistake to assume that Leary is as unpleasant as his Rescue Me character.
"I never heard anybody complain about Denis," Tolan says. "I complain about Denis because I have to work with him so much. I'm in contact with him more than anyone else on the show, so goddamn it, I have the right to complain. But when people tell me, 'Boy, Tommy Gavin is an incredibly complex, dysfunctional character,' I always say the same thing, which is, 'Denis is acting!' Frankly, if he was that dysfunctional, that much of a prick, would I work with him for seven years?'"
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