Logue’s on a roll

Though actor Donal Logue is working on three TV shows simultaneously, set in three different centuries, filmed in three different countries, he doesn’t depend on his acting career.

The Canada-born actor has had his share of feckless days, but now he’s wisely diversified. “I have a trucking company and have a hardwood company out of Oregon. Last year I delivered loads to LA in an 18-wheeler, sold my first novel, did three TV shows.

“I tell my kids (boys, 12 and 14) you can do whatever you want. When the front door’s closed on you, you go around the back, break a window and you get in if you have to.”

Logue, who spent seven years as the young dad on Grounded for Life, is playing the Boss Tweed-like character on BBC America’s Copper, which is filmed in Toronto and began its second season recently.

Of Irish descent, he identifies strongly with the role. “When the Irish showed up they were the most wretched people that anyone had seen because at that time in history, during the famine they were dying by the millions,” says Logue, who was a history major at Harvard.

“They showed up in the US so destitute they were the Cambodian refugees of the mid- 19th century. And they were Catholics in a world controlled by Protestants, so there was a lot of anti-papist feeling.

“Now 40mn to 50mn Americans identify with being Irish, but at the time it was more of a scourge than a badge of honour. What I get to play is the guy in this narrative fiction who says, ‘It’s our time. It starts now.’”

Logue also costars in Sons of Anarchy, which is filmed in LA, and in The Vikings, which shoots in Dublin. While he says he’s grateful for the opportunity, he understands it could all end tomorrow.

“Seventy-two hours in any direction can change your life,” he says perched on a maroon flowered settee in his publicist’s office here in Los Angeles.

“I’ve been sober a long time. I quit drinking 22 years ago and I’m always thinking you can always make a weird decision in life ... It’s just how to beak ruts.”

He has a history of breaking ruts. The biggest came when he was 25 and found himself drifting. “I was sitting in El Centro,  listening to heavy metal on this boom box — a mobile home with lawn furniture in it, and someone said, ‘Hey, bro, somebody said you went to Harvard.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I did.’

“I realised I was supposed to be the guy who left this town on the Mexican border ... Then one day you wake up and say, ‘I own you. I dictate everything about your life. You need to feed ME.’ So I said enough is enough. I’m done with it. That was May of 1991 and it changed my life.”

Logue’s parents were missionaries and he moved often as a kid. Adept at athletics, he showed promise in both tennis and soccer. When he was 14 he was a heralded distance runner with Olympic ambitions. But those dreaded 72 hours intervened.

“I won this big race, and the next day had to do a report and got hit by a car and was laid up for six months in traction.” He suffered seven compound fractures in his right leg.

“So I spent all this time — my family had to work — so I was left in a room. I went from being this guy with all these athletic dreams ... But I was used to winning and I wasn’t going to be that level of athlete anymore. I think those months becoming much more inward thinking, reading all the time (changed me).”

In his sophomore year he became obstreperous and his parents sent him to England to live with his aunt and uncle. But he was kicked out of school there and returned.

“So I got back to the United States and made a promise to myself that I would clean up my act, get it together and focus on going for things and using what I had,” says Logue, whose unruly hair is captured loosely in a pony tail.

“Luckily for me an academic decathlon came along and I won the state speech championship that year. I went to Boys’ Nation, which this American Legion thing where they take a kid from every high school. I was elected Boys’ Nation president and got my pick of universities.”

But Harvard didn’t save him either. He discovered acting. “My mother, Irish immigrant that she is, reacted as though I’d joined the motorcycle club. It was so heartbreaking,” he says.

After graduation, Logue, 47, found himself in Los Angeles. “I was working as a janitor and I was happy. Then of course, the universe opens and someone says, ‘You should talk to this casting director.’ She says, ‘We’re doing this movie Sneakers and having a tough time casting this one part of a mathematician.’ I went in and just nailed it. You get a few windows of opportunity — just recognise them.” — MCT