Neal McDonough would like a second take.
After making headlines for saying on a recent podcast that Hollywood “completely turned on me” for refusing to kiss anyone other than his wife, the veteran actor and his better half walked back those remarks in a joint interview with TMZ.
“We want to say thank you, Hollywood,” Ruvé McDonough said, expressing gratitude for her husband’s success in showbiz. “I don’t like how people are saying that Hollywood turned its back on Neal. No, it didn’t. The right people found Neal and put him in the right place. 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. Guided us to where we are is what Hollywood did, and we want to say, ‘Thank you, Hollywood.'”
Neal, whose screen credits include popular shows like Yellowstone and Suits, agreed. “Everyone talks about that stuff that happened all those years ago,” he said. “If it weren’t for that, we wouldn’t be here. Those were stepping stones, and it made our relationship closer.”
The reframing came in the wake of Neal appearing on the Nothing Left Unsaid podcast and saying that he’d been fired from an unnamed TV show after refusing to film an intimate scene with a costar.
“When I wouldn’t do it, and they couldn’t understand it, Hollywood just completely turned on me,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me be part of the show anymore. And 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.”
Emerson Miller/Paramount Network
Kevin Costner and Neal McDonough on ‘Yellowstone’
He also explained what had been behind his decision. “I always had in my contracts that I wouldn’t kiss another woman on screen,” he said on the podcast. “My wife didn’t have any 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.'”
The couple now share five children, whom they also mentioned in their joint interview. “If they were to see Dad kissing another woman, it would hurt them,” Ruvé said. “When Neal swears on film, which he rarely does, we would tell our kids when they were younger, ‘Oh, no, that’s a dub, that’s a voiceover. Dad did not say S-H-I-T,’ because we don’t swear.”
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She also reiterated their good fortune, saying, “We cannot explain and express how blessed we are, how happy we are. Everything that’s going on, talking about how Hollywood dissed Neal and whatnot — no. Everything that’s happened has brought us closer to where we are now.”
Neal’s other screen credits include TV’s Band of Brothers, Arrow, Desperate Housewives, and The Flash, plus films like Minority Report and The Last Rodeo. He costarred in the latter film with his wife.
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