Open Range

Gerald McRaney features so prominently in the two-and-a-half-minute trailer for NBC’s new drama This Is Us that you might think he’s a series regular.

He’s not. He has a recurring role as Dr. Nathan Katowsky, a folksy obstetrician.

“I think I lost work because the promotion featured me so much that people thought I was one of the leads,” says McRaney, perhaps best known as the big-brother detective in Simon & Simon (1981–89) and the by-the- book Marine-turned-stepfather in Major Dad (1989-93). “It’s one of the nicer shows that I’ve done in recent memory.”

Whether he’s playing good guys or bad, McRaney relishes acting. “Before I got Simon & Simon, I was the guest villain in damn near everything. I was a character actor, then one day the character happened to be one of the leads.”

As a teen growing up in Collins, Mississippi, McRaney (in conversation, he prefers Mac) injured his knee, which kept him off the football team. He began building sets in the local drama club, and in his first play the tall young man was cast as a dwarf.

After attending Ole Miss, he spent four years in a New Orleans repertory company, which ran out of funds. So he moved to Los Angeles, landing a starring role in the 1969 B-movie Night of Bloody Horror. “The main lesson we learned from that,” he says, “was how not to make a movie.”

McRaney has worked steadily since then — going on 50 years. Even surgery in 2004 to remove the middle lobe of his right lung didn’t sideline him for long. He attributes his staying power to his love of his craft, proper pacing and good fortune.

Now in demand as a character actor, he plays to his strengths. “Especially when you begin to age, if you’re holding out for the lead, you’re probably going to have a shorter career.”

In recent years he’s been seen in House of Cards (as billionaire industrialist Raymond Tusk), Longmire (real estate magnate Barlow Connally), Southland (suicidal retired LAPD officer Hicks), Justified (scam artist Josiah Cairn) and Deadwood (mining titan George Hearst).

He loves the variety — and the company. Performing with Kevin Spacey on House of Cards, he raves, is like “discovering one day you’re playing in the NFL and your quarterback is Peyton Manning.”

Tusk first appears late in season one of the Netflix series, when he is sent by the president to vet Spacey’s character, Congressman Francis Underwood, for the vice-presidency.

“The [initial] scene was like two fighters feeling each other out in the first round of a championship bout,” McRaney recalls. “I needed to figure out who this man was, what he was really all about. So there was that tension going on.”

These days, McRaney says, his ambition is “smoldering, not burning. A project has got to spark my interest to get me out of the house.”

Since 1989 that home life has been spent with his wife, actress Delta Burke, who made a guest appearance on Simon & Simon in 1987. McRaney returned the favor, appearing on her series, Designing Women, in ’87 and ’88.

Looking back on those early years, he observes: “I started out in a rep company. That’s where the great fun is. One night you’re the king, and the next night you’re carrying a spear. That’s why I started doing this. Not to be a movie star. I wanted to be an actor.

“To go from playing [Longmire ’s Connally, who kills his own son] to playing the doctor in This Is Us is about as big a jump as you can make,” he continues. “That’s what actors do. You go to places that aren’t you, but there’s that dark corner of every one of us that’s lurking inside. Occasionally actors have to open that door, and if we’re lucky, we can close it again really quickly.”

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 10, 2016