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Neal McDonough clarified his comments about losing “everything” due to his no onscreen kissing rule during a joint interview with his wife, Ruvé McDonough.
“We are so fortunate. Everybody that talks about all that stuff that happened all those years ago and if it weren’t for that, we wouldn’t be here,” the actor shared
Neal previously revealed that he refuses to “kiss another woman onscreen” besides his wife
Neal McDonough is setting the record straight after claiming he lost “everything” due to his stance on filming romantic scenes.
During an appearance on the Nothing Left Unsaid podcast, the 59-year-old actor claimed he “lost everything” for refusing to kiss another woman onscreen besides his wife Ruvé McDonough. However, in a joint interview with Ruvé thereafter, Neal — who has appeared in The Last Rodeo, Suits and Yellowstone among other projects — clarified that he is nothing but grateful for his experience in Hollywood.
“The right people found Neal and put him in the right places,” Ruvé told TMZ. “We want to say thank you, Hollywood. We want to continue doing incredible films with Neal, giving the right messages. We don’t want to say Hollywood turned — [it] guided us to where we are is what Hollywood did. And we say thank you, Hollywood.”
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Ruvé McDonough (L) and Neal McDonough (R) attend the premiere of “Homestead” at AMC The Grove 14 on December 10, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.
The couple shared that Neal’s rule about onscreen kissing has allowed their family to flourish.
“We cannot explain how blessed we are and how happy we are,” she said. “Everything that’s going on, talking about how Hollywood dissed Neal…no, everything that has happened has brought us closer to where we are now.”
She continued: “Every stepping stone has been the right stone. Some fumbles, some big leaps, whatever it is. Here we are 25 years later, 5 kids and so blessed.”
“We are so fortunate,” Neal added. “Everybody that talks about all that stuff that happened all those years ago and if it weren’t for that, we wouldn’t be here. Those are stepping stones.”
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Ruvé teased the pair “probably wouldn’t have been together” without the rule, to which Neal responded, “I don’t know about that.”
“I mean if you had done what everyone else had [done], like kissing people, [being with] other people, and being away from the family, where you took a stand…you said, ‘enough this is where I’m gonna be and where I want to be with my wife and children,’” she said before her husband gave her a sweet kiss.
In a second TMZ clip, Ruvé opened up about why the no-kissing rule was important to the couple.
“To be honest, we are such a close, tight-knit family … so the kids, if they were to see dad truly kissing another woman, it would hurt them,” she said. “When Neal swears on film — which he rarely does — we’d tell our kids when they were younger, that’s a dub, that’s a voiceover.”
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Ruvé McDonough, Neal McDonough and family attend “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” Premiere on November 02, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.
During his appearance on the Nothing Left Unsaid podcast, Neal revealed that he made the rule to protect his wife and children.
“I had always had in my contracts that I wouldn’t kiss another woman onscreen,” he explained, clarifying that it was not his wife who proposed the rule. “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.'”
Neal admitted that the rule ultimately “got him blacklisted” and left Hollywood confused about what to do with him.
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“A lot of people say, ‘Well, you kill thousands of people in all of your movies, sometimes millions, and you won’t kiss another woman onscreen?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, but you’re not really killing anybody,'” he said of his frequent villain roles. “And it’s kind of funny on the day when we’re doing it. But intimacy is a whole different thing for me.”
Saying that “Hollywood just completely turned on me,” he recalled feeling untethered and said that he “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. And once you don’t have that identity, you’re kind of lost in a tailspin,” he admitted, saying that it continued “for a couple of years.”
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