Modern Family star Ed O’Neill has recalled how nearly ended up joining the mob before landing his role on the Emmy-winning ABC sitcom.
The actor starred as Jay Pritchett on the 11-season series, which ran from 2009 until 2020.
Appearing on former co-star Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner on Me podcast on Tuesday (16 January), O’Neill said that when he cut from the National Football League’s Pittsburgh Steelers in 1969, he didn’t know what to do with his life and could have easily been pushed into organised crime.
“Youngstown [Ohio] was not a good place to live for opportunities. Really, there was nothing there for me,” the Married…with Children star said. “The only thing that I had that I could’ve done – and thank God I didn’t – was organised crime because I had friends in organised crime.”
O’Neill recalled how his childhood friend Jim took him to a fancy restaurant, where they met with a bartender whom Jim bribed for information on someone he was looking for.
“We left and [Jim] said, ‘You can do this kind of stuff for me, you know, I’ll protect you, I’ll give you easy stuff. Just you collect here. You do that. You run, you drop something off here and there. You know, you may have to lean on a guy. You’re good at that. You can make some good money,’” said O’Neill.
“I said, ‘Let me think about it, Jim. Cause I’m, I don’t know. I might be leaving town to pursue this acting thing,’” he said. “So I went home and was thinking about it! I thought, ‘What else am I going to do?’”
However, O’Neill later explained how his father made him realise the mob wasn’t for him, and that he should instead move to New York to pursue a career in acting.
O’Neill went on to land his first on-screen role in the 1980 crime thriller Cruising, starring Al Pacino. Seven years later, he landed the role of Al Bundy on the Fox sitcom Married… with Children, in which he starred for 11 seasons.
However, the actor is now best known for his role as the tough but loving patriarch Jay Pritchett on Modern Family, for which he earned three Outstanding Actor Emmy nominations.
Back in November, O’Neill reunited with the cast of Modern Family for the first time in three years.
Elsewhere, fellow co-star Sofia Vergara recently dismissed the possibility of a Modern Family reboot happening anytime soon.
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