“That was a big thing for me,” recalls O’Donnell.
“That was the first movie I ever made.
And you know, to this day, it still may be the best movie I ever made.
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He and producer Jon Avnet were really the two guys who changed my life.
Even though it wasn’t a huge box office success, it made a huge impact in Hollywood.
Suddenly every major agency wanted to represent me.
Everybody wanted to hire me.”
But O’Connell said yes because Avnet wanted him on the film.
“He told me I was going to learn how to do a Southern accent.
Universal Pictures
I drove down on what was my 21st birthday.
I pulled into a little motel in Senoia, Georgia or somewhere.
I show up and go, ‘where is everybody?’
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So I ended up getting really bad takeout Chinese food and a six-pack of beer.
That’s how I spent my 21st birthday.”
It was incredible bonding experience.
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Look at movies likeTapsorThe Outsider.
You think of guys who were young and working.
They are all movie stars now.
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I mean, we are were all living in the Radison in Chelmsford, Massachusetts.
We finally moved out and got these apartments across from the dump in Lowell.
You’d have to close your windows because it smelled so bad.
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We were getting paid nothing and having a ball.
How amazing to look back at how simple those times were.
Now I’m living in Pacific Palisades and Ben and Matt both own houses within three miles of me.
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That’s how it all ends up."
“It was good for the movie.
He also told Al, ‘don’t get cozy with Chris.
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I mean, be nice to him, but don’t buddy up with him.’
Then he started to be much friendlier at the end and invited me over a couple of times.
He explained to me that the director had told him not to get too close.
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Thankfully, at the end, we got to hang out.”
“I was so green,” he recalls.
“I didn’t no any better.
I would come up for a reason why I couldn’t do it.
That was just me not knowing what my own abilities were.
And someone told me and my direct roommate, ‘you two are going as Batman and Robin.’
I said, ‘there is no way I’m getting dressed up as Robin.
Not even for Halloween am I going to be Robin.”
And then of course I ended up as Robin across the world.
It was a great experience, but clearly we did one too many.
Maybe we should have quit while we were ahead.
I think Warner Bros. just got a little greedy."
“That was done on an outdoor wall,” O’Donnell remembers.
“It was huge.
The thing must have been eight stories high.
Filming it was one thing, but just the idea of that is hard to fathom.
You gotta have a screw loose to want to climb some of those ledges.
I watchedFree Solo.I can’t even imagine.
I got anxiety just watching them.
And people do that are doing that for fun?
They are cut from a different cloth.”
Fortunately, O’Donnell knew his time at Seattle Grace would be short and sweet.
“It was always supposed to be an in and out thing,” he recalls.
“They kept asking me to stay for some more episodes.
I was going to be so far down the totem pole.
TV can be a great business but it’s crucial that you participate in it.
From a business standpoint, it wasn’t going to be a success for me.
But what it did for me was incredible.
It gave me an enormous boost.
I was blown away by how many people were watching that show.
Everywhere I went, people were watching that show!
I’m very grateful to Shonda Rhimes and the team for the run.
It opened up a lot of doors for me and kind of brought me back.”
“CBS is really good at doing these shows that become comfort food to people.
you’re free to’t just be constantly ripping headlines from the news and turning them into episodes.
The trick is to get the audience to fall in love with these characters.
Because once they do, they will go on any journey you want.
They will tune in.
They want to see their friends.
We were waiting for the text to tell us what our numbers were.
They came in and we had these great numbers.
People tuned in and they stayed tuned it.
It was six episodes later that we got sold in syndication, which was unheard of.
It was really a validation of what we were doing.”
