Peter Gallagher: ‘Fame is toxic. It can kill you’

Peter Gallagher has one of those faces: instantly recognisable, hard to place. As we sit drinking coffee at an upmarket hotel near Manhattan’s Times Square, a woman in her sixties juts a pointed finger out in his direction. “I know you! Well, I don’t know you,” she admits, “but I know you!” The actor smiles, says hello, and turns to me: “That’s the title of my memoir.”

We’re meeting to talk about his latest role on Broadway opposite Julianna Margulies in Left on Tenth. The new play, written by Delia Ephron (the lesser-known but equally prolific screenwriting sister of romcom queen Nora), is inspired by the You’ve Got Mail co-writer’s real-life meet-cute. She met Peter – a Jungian psychotherapist living in the Bay Area – via email following the death of her husband Jerome Kass in 2015 and amid her battle with leukemia. In a rare turn for Gallagher, he plays Peter – whom Ephron married in hospital in 2017 – a man who is warm, intelligent, tender.

Rare because, for decades, the New York-born actor has been one of Hollywood’s go-to sleazeballs. He played an unctuous lawyer having an affair with his wife’s sister in Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989) and Buddy King, the Donald Trump-inspired “real estate king”, in American Beauty (1999). He became one of America’s favourite “TV dads” in The OC and more recently, he was cast as a white-collar crook in Netflix’s Grace and Frankie and an absentee father in New Girl. His handsome, dark features, thick eyebrows and carefully coiffured hair – now a clash of silver and black – suggest a sense of wealth, arrogance and vanity that directors loved. The subversive filmmaker Robert Altman – who cast the actor in 1992’s The Player and 1993’s Short Cuts – used to say: “Gallagher, you’re so good-looking it makes me sick.”

It wasn’t just that Gallagher was good-looking – it was that he somehow looked as though he knew he was. “With a face like mine, you really do have permission to just hate me,” Gallagher, now 69, admits with modesty. “When I was younger, my looks were described as cartoonish. I would be in meetings where producers would gleefully say: ‘Look at that face man!’ Or a director once said: ‘Oh my God, put a scar on him!’”

Gallagher’s preened appearance has sometimes led people to underestimate him or assume that he is privileged. The Graduate director Mike Nichols admitted as much to the actor while they were rehearsing Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing on Broadway, alongside Glenn Close, Jeremy Irons, Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon. An incandescent Gallagher, who was just 29 at the time, shot back at the director: “You hate my f***ing face? Do you want to fire me? I’ll grow a beard so I can hide my face. You don’t have to look at it, OK?” The actor followed through on his threat, growing out a goatee, which a grovelling Nichols later begged him to shave off before opening night.

“I know the kind of guttural response people have to my appearance,” Gallagher says of a problem that female actors grapple with constantly, but which rarely affects their male counterparts. “I don’t mind it so much because people with lesser imagination or confidence always underestimate you. They assume you’re stupid, you haven’t worked hard, you come from money and you’ve had every privilege. None of that is true and so you’re constantly in the position of surprising people.”

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In reality, Gallagher grew up in a working-class Irish Catholic family in a Westchester suburb about 30 miles north of Manhattan. His mother was a bacteriologist who later suffered from dementia and his father was an advertising executive and Second World War veteran. I ask about his relationship with his father, which has been described as “difficult” in past interviews. He corrects me: “It wasn’t really difficult, he just didn’t talk to me… I don’t think he understood how important he was to me.” As a result, the actor – who graduated with a degree in economics before studying acting at the William Esper Studio in New York – found surrogates in his acting heroes, such as Peter O’Toole, James Cagney and Jack Lemmon, all of whom he worked with. “When those guys would speak to me, it meant the world to me,” he says. While his father refused to open up to him, the likes of O’Toole did. “I thought, I’m not broken. It’s not my fault. I can carry on a conversation after all.”

It was O’Toole who provided what Gallagher remembers as “the best moment of my life”, during the shoot for the wacky 1988 comedy High Spirits in Ireland. He was in the background of a scene they were filming one day and realised he could finish early if he just crept out of the shot. As he edged out of frame, he felt a hand pulling him yet further off the set. Affecting O’Toole’s velvety, upper-crust English accent, Gallagher recalls the Lawrence of Arabia star telling him: “Just a little further, dear boy, just a little further. There, welcome to the Peter O’Toole school of acting!… Lunch?”

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From 2003 to 2007, Gallagher got to return the favour to the next generation in The OC. Gallagher played Sandy Cohen, a liberal public defender who takes in troubled teen Ryan Atwood as his adopted son. Fox’s seminal drama about a group of wealthy high schoolers from Orange County made stars of young actors Adam Brody, Rachel Bilson and Mischa Barton, the last of whom started to wither in the spotlight. Reports of excessive alcohol and drug use preceded a DUI arrest in 2007 and an infamous hospitalisation in 2009, where she was kept under involuntary psychiatric hold after threatening suicide. “I’ve always felt very protective of her,” Gallagher says of Barton. “First fame is toxic. First fame can kill you. She was 16 years old when she started working with us, so just the fact that she’s still alive, I’m just so grateful.”

For Gallagher, fame came much more gradually and with less scrutiny. He cut his teeth on Broadway, slicking his hair to play Danny Zuko in Grease – a role he won from an open audition in 1978. “It was a great time to be young and doing Grease because the critics didn’t come,” he says. “I did 500 performances of that show. It wasn’t going to make you famous. It wasn’t going to ruin you. Nobody was reviewing it, but it was a great training ground.”

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These days Gallagher lives in Connecticut with his wife of 41 years, Paula Harwood. They met in college and have two grown-up children. Today, in a cosy grey sweater, marching around a restaurant in search of a waiter to take our order, he certainly has the air of a Sandy Cohen-like father figure. Perhaps it’s no wonder he relied on Trump to coax out his inner villain. “Of all the real estate guys,” Gallagher recalls asking himself before filming American Beauty, “who has the greatest opinion of themselves and lets the world know it?” That was back in the Nighties. But Gallagher’s opinion of the mogul had already been sealed when Trump took out a full-page ad in The New York Times in 1989 calling for the execution of the wrongly convicted Central Park Five. “I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a darkness that I didn’t suspect was there.’ Of course, when you learn more about him, you shouldn’t be surprised.”

Celebrities talking about politics has become a hot-button topic in the lead-up to this year’s US presidential election. Many, including Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell and recently Pharrell Williams, have suggested that their peers should keep their opinions to themselves. “They only say that if they disagree with your point of view,” Gallagher says. “Everybody has the right to speak their mind and support who they want to support. It’s just so patently…” he trails off, shaking his head. “What, like the discourse is so elevated that there’s no way we could approach it? It’s a cesspool. We’re basically fighting for our lives in this country right now.”

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Speaking out can be “treacherous”, Gallagher admits. Last year, his Left on Tenth co-star Margulies found herself in hot water after suggesting that the Black and LGBT+ communities were not sufficiently supportive of Israel in the wake of the 7 October attacks. She quickly backpedalled, expressing her horror at having offended “communities I truly love and respect”. “Everybody’s quick to cancel,” Gallagher says in defence of his colleague. “I know for a fact that Julianna is a wonderful, honest, forthright, moral person. And so, yeah, she’ll probably be more careful about what she says.” The younger generation, he warns, would do well to remember that “no one has ever gotten it right in all of human history. The only real solace is in our mutual recognition of each other’s frailties and imperfections.”

What about his American Beauty co-star, Kevin Spacey? Will people look back on the provocative drama differently in light of the numerous sexual assault allegations against the actor? (Spacey was cleared of sexually assaulting four men at a trial in London last year.) “I mean, it’ll certainly give a different kind of lustre, or lack of, to people’s impression of that performance,” Gallagher says. In fact, Gallagher was first told it was he who would be playing the lead role of Lester Burnham. “I thought, holy s***, my ship has come in. Oh my God, this is the best day of my life.” Moments later, his agent called him back: “Hey, I made a little mistake, it’s for Buddy.” Gallagher acts out the phone call for me, his mouth agape in mock devastation.

Gallagher has made peace with a career built on supporting roles, even if that career is surprising, given his looks. “The few leading roles I had, the movies didn’t make money [straight-to-TV films like Virtual Obsession and The Last Debate], so if I wanted to continue to work it was going to be in those kinds of roles,” he says of his typecasting as a swine. “The trick was to make them interesting.” What advice does he have for his 31-year-old daughter, Kathryn, an actor who’s played minor roles in You and the Gossip Girl reboot? “There’s no secret to it. You just have to try to be better than the competition,” he says. “If you’re willing to work harder and keep that love you have for it alive, that’ll see you through.”

‘Left on Tenth’ is at the James Earl Jones Theatre on Broadway until 2 Feb; shubert.nyc