Character actor Neal McDonough appears on-screen a lot, with more than 20 roles across film and television in the 2020s alone. But these parts weren’t always rolling in. According to McDonough, at an unsaid point in his career, he stopped receiving jobs due to a romantic clause in his contract as an actor.
“I always had in my contracts that I wouldn’t kiss another woman on-screen,” McDonough said on Tim Green’s “Nothing Left Unsaid” podcast. “My wife didn’t really have a problem with it. It was me really who had a problem. I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to put you through it. I know we’re going to start having kids, and I don’t want to put my kids through it.'”
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Since 2003, McDonough has been married to Ruvé Robertson, a South African model he met during the filming of “Band of Brothers.” The couple have five children together.
Though McDonough had been acting for more than a decade beforehand, the acclaimed war miniseries “Band of Brothers” is known as one of his most significant early roles. A year later, he would appear in Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report.” Since then, McDonough has gone on to have a fairly consistent career as a character actor across film and television.
But McDonough asserts this wasn’t always the case. Though he didn’t say exactly when, he said the decision to put a no-kissing rule in his contracts affected his employability at a point in his career.
“Hollywood just completely turned on me, and they wouldn’t let me be part of the show anymore,” McDonough said. “For two years, I couldn’t get a job, and I lost everything you could possibly imagine — not just houses and material things, but your swagger, your cool, who you are, your identity, everything. My identity was an actor, and a really good one.”
McDonough said that he used the situation to pivot toward being a “villain du jour,” taking on a number of roles as bad guys on screens big and small. The actor played a pivotal role in the CW’s DC TV universe, portraying the villain Damien Darhk in shows like “Arrow” and “Legends of Tomorrow.” He wanted to become “the best villain on the planet.”
“I think I kind of achieved that, to an extent,” McDonough said.
In 2025, McDonough helped write and starred in “The Last Rodeo” for Angel Studios. Last year, he starred in “Homestead” for the studio. He was added as a series regular for the second season of “Tulsa King” opposite Sylvester Stallone. Still, the actor said the alleged blacklist put him in a bad place mentally.
“Once you don’t have that identity, you’re kind of lost in a tailspin,” McDonough said. “I was in a big, ugly tailspin for a couple of years, and it still took me a couple of years thereafter to kind of break the habit of, ‘Am I really in the show, or is this just kind of a part-time thing?'”
The post Neal McDonough Says He ‘Lost Everything’ in Hollywood Thanks to His No-Kiss Contract: ‘I Couldn’t Get a Job’ appeared first on TheWrap.
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