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| 'Touching Evil' star learned his craft in detention |
By LUAINE LEE, Scripps Howard News Service
(May 25,
11:14 am PDT) - When actor Jeffrey Donovan was in the third grade he earned
detention for misbehaving. Sent into a room by himself he was bored and
fidgeting.
"I started to play and just entertain myself, making up voices
and characters ... I remember it so clearly and said, 'Wait a minute, I can DO
this.'"
From then on Donovan divided his time between sports and drama,
finally settling on acting after a teacher singled him out as the one student
who should try to act professionally.
Though he's grown about three feet
since then, Donovan is still fidgety and eccentric. It's that very peculiarity
that earned him the starring role in USA's "Touching Evil," an American
adaptation of the hit British series which airs Monday nights.
The
show is produced by partners Bruce Willis and Arnold Rifkin and by the Hughes
Brothers. They had searched for two months for someone to play the quixotic and
erratic detective, David Creegan.
"Allen Hughes' manager was in my
management company as well. They were complaining they couldn't find this guy.
They said, 'Have you seen Jeff Donovan? ... He sounds like what you're looking
for,'" says Donovan.
"I read it and as soon as I finished it, I went back
to the first page and said, 'I have to read it again, it's so brilliant. And I
know exactly how to do it.' ... I don't know who Arnold Rifkin is, I didn't know
he's a big deal in this town. So I kept working on this role and Creegan is
shameless, he'll say anything. I was in that mindset. So I walked in, and you
could see the room was tense and people were unhappy. At the table was this
striking, strong figure. He looked down at his paper and didn't even look up. He
goes, 'Do you know what we're doing here?' I said, 'I have no idea what you're
doing here, I know what I'm doing here.' And the whole table looked at Arnold
and looked at me and he said, 'Show me.'"
The perfectly quirky Donovan
showed him, acing the part.
Still, it wasn't a straight line from a
master's degree at NYU to a starring role on TV. Donovan spent 11 years working
in New York, mostly on the stage.
The toughest time came when he was 24
and had just broken up with his girlfriend of five years.
"I moved out
because I knew ultimately I wasn't going to be happy. So I moved out and didn't
work for nine months straight. And I was alone. And it got so bad that I had to
rent an $11-a-night water closet basically in a transient hotel on the lower
west side of Manhattan, down by the meat packing district. You opened the door
and it hit the bed. ... I only had a bag and a cell phone. I couldn't get a job
as a waiter, couldn't get a job as a bartender. I was on unemployment for nine
months. That was pretty scary," he says.
"We all go through theses peaks
and valleys - I hit my worst valley."
Another was the loss of his younger
brother in an automobile accident 17 years ago, which Donovan still can't recall
without crying.
He grew up in the small town of Amesbury, Mass., where
his divorced mother worked in a factory rearing her three boys by
herself.
Donovan, 36, was able to line up partially paid tuition for
college, but had to work to support himself and took out student loans for
graduate school.
Afterward, he managed to earn a living doing plays,
guest spots on television and a turn on a soap in New York. But when he came to
LA things looked bleak. It was 10 months before he found a job - the indelible
role as Creegan.
Never married, Donovan is dating actress Ellen Muth
who's starring in Showtime's "Dead Like Me."
"I had a rule for years to
not date actresses, and I've struck by it," he shakes his head. "So for me to
like her she has to be extraordinary because we both said we don't date actors.
In fact, we were just friends, and a month later we figured we were hanging out
with each other all the time and missed each other."
END
May 25, 2004 - article courtesy of tribnet.com
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