The star of FX’s critically adored Terriers and now Fox’s Batman origin story, Gotham , Donal Logue is the consummate character actor, one finally poised to receive his due.
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Donal Logue sat in a booth of a greasy-spoon diner close to the highway in Studio City, Calif. It's not the sort of place an actor typically picks for an interview, a far cry from a beachfront hotel or private Hollywood club, but then again, Logue isn't your typical actor. For one, it was 9:30 on a Friday morning, but Logue had arrived for our interview more than an hour early and already eaten breakfast. As I walked up to greet him, the table was already cleared and he sat quietly observing the other patrons with a half-empty mug of black coffee in his hands. After I sat down across from him, the 48-year-old actor pulled out his phone to show a photo of what his hair had looked like a few days earlier.
"Hey, Jimmy," he said, flagging over a sleepy waiter with tattoo sleeves, "check it out."
The photo was of the back of Logue's head, his rusty red hair tied into a ponytail that dangled just below his shoulder blades. It was long, and we all leaned in to gawk at it.
"That's what you just cut off?" Jimmy asked, looking genuinely shocked.
"Yeah, two days ago." Logue's accent is California surfer with a sandy desert edge.
Jimmy topped off Logue's mug before leaving. As Logue sipped from the worn mug, he was practically unrecognizable from the gritty characters for which he's most well-known: outcasts and rebels, warriors with dangerous glints in their eyes or washed-up losers with their better days behind them. His hair was trimmed to just above his ears. He was clean-shaven, wearing a navy blazer with a button-up shirt; he looked almost professorial — a far cry from his most recent TV gigs, as vengeful Lee Toric on Sons of Anarchy and the manipulative King Horik in Vikings, among others.
"I get it," Logue said, laughing. "I look a certain way one way. The other way, I'm just the assistant manager at Circuit City."
Logue had cut his hair for a potential new role. It wasn't a role he'd landed yet, but as he explained, preparation is incredibly important. "I went back yesterday, and the director was like, 'Could you do the whole script?' I was like, 'Yeah. I've memorized 30 scenes.' It has just become part of the DNA of the last couple years of work in Terriers. I'm like, 'Yeah, man. I'm on it. We could do it all if you want.' It's fun that way. Your only defense is preparation."
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For an actor who's been working consistently for the last 20 years, Logue still doesn't exist on most people's radars. He's had roles in close to 50 films, including Jerry Maguire, Blade, The Patriot, and The Tao of Steve, for which he won a Special Grand Jury Prize for best actor at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. And he's also starred in TV shows like Grounded for Life, ER, and The Practice, and anchored the short-lived but beloved FX series Terriers. At the same time, none of those roles have translated into major fame. But this year could be the one that does: He's got a recurring role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as the not-always-by-the-book Lieutenant Declan Murphy, and was cast as Detective Harvey Bullock in Fox's highly anticipated Batman-origin pilot, Gotham, which seems a lock for a series order. Still, with so many notches on his film belt, can you ever really be sure that this one will be the one?
"There are a lot of people in entertainment who have been way more successful than I have in a number of different ways," he admitted. His elbows rested on the plastic table as he leaned forward. "I'm a yeoman kind of guy who has worked and been in a lot of things. I'm not a star. I don't live in a mansion."
Logue is arguably the most un-actory actor in Hollywood. He grew up in the desert town of El Centro, Calif. — next to the Mexican border — with three sisters, including actress Karina Logue, whom he calls "the actor of the family." He's the son of Irish immigrants, his parents having met when they were Catholic missionaries in Africa. "I was an altar boy," he said. "I went to mass every day for years." The family would travel back to Ireland frequently, and Logue even spent his junior year of high school abroad in North London with relatives.
"We kind of had exposure that you don't normally have in a small town," Logue's sister Karina said in a phone interview. "The idea of the world being very open and full of curious things had always been around us."
And Logue was an intensely curious kid. According to his sister, "He'd always be reading history books on his own — even in the third grade — that were high school-level and didn't have anything to do with school, they were just Donal's interests." He was by all accounts insanely precocious.
It wasn't just books he found a passion for, though: He also excelled in sports and joined the baseball, football, tennis, soccer, and track and field teams. He even remembers details about the sports he'd compete in — down to scarily accurate detail. "When I was 11, I remember running this 10-mile race. It was 10.1 in 1:01:43," he said. He didn't miss a beat. "My two-mile split was 10:42, so you're clocking 5:20 miles to start a 10-mile race at 11 years old. My small group was deeply committed and would compete at nationals and stuff. It's just a different era."
Logue would continue to drop small bundles of information in this manner throughout the interview — effortlessly quoting a passage of a book he once read, waxing philosophical on the origin of the human race, and delving into the business politics of owning a trucking company. (More on that later.)
In high school, Logue described himself as "garrulous" and "a real joker," while Karina said he was a "very popular kid." That could be because he wasn't just active in sports, but also in theater: He performed in a Eugene Ionesco play, The Bald Soprano, in high school and participated in the speech and debate teams — he was the California state champion in impromptu speaking. He was also an avid reader, and consumed everything from Joyce to Faulkner, V.S. Naipaul, Mark Twain, and Thomas Hardy. He had a hand in anything that would allow him to and was a bit of a real-life version of Election's Tracy Flick, only likable.
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