Holt McCallany

Early life

McCallany was born September 3, 1963, in New York City, to theatrical parents. His mother, Julie Wilson (1924–2015), was an American singer and actress, "widely regarded as the queen of cabaret." His father, Michael McAloney (1924–2000), was an Irish actor and producer best known for his Tony Award-winning production of Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy, an autobiographical play about a young member of the Irish Republican Army, which was the first Irish production to win top honors on Broadway.

Because his father wanted an Irish education for his two sons, Holt and his younger brother were sent to live with another family in Dublin, while his parents stayed in New York City, working. However, following his parents' divorce the children moved back to the United States and Holt attended school in New Jersey. He was later sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Omaha, Nebraska, where he had a troubled childhood and was expelled from the Jesuit Creighton Preparatory School. At the age of 14, he ran away from home and took a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles to pursue his dream of becoming an actor but ended up with a job in a screwdriver factory unloading trucks. His parents eventually tracked him down and sent him back to Ireland to a boarding school in County Kildare that his father had attended forty years earlier.

He soon left Ireland and eventually graduated from Creighton Preparatory School. After high school, Holt went to France for college, first to study French at the Sorbonne and Art at the Paris American Academy, and later Theater at L'École Marcel Marceau and L'École Jacques Lecoq, but was expelled. Holt spent a summer studying Shakespeare in Oxford, and went with a production of Twelfth Night to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, before moving to New York City to begin his professional acting career.

Career

His first job in the professional theater was as an apprentice actor at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, Ohio, in the same apprenticeship once served by Tom Hanks, among others. Subsequently, he returned to New York City and was cast as an understudy in the brazers production of Biloxi Blues.

McCallany landed a series of supporting parts in such films as Casualties of War, Alien 3, Creepshow 2, The Search for One-eye Jimmy, Jade and Rough Riders. After playing the legendary boxing trainer Teddy Atlas in the HBO telefilm, Tyson he became a supporter of the Atlas Foundation Charity, a grassroots organization dedicated to helping children and families with medical and financial hardships.

He continued working in films and television throughout the nineties with roles in films such as Fight Club, Three Kings, Men of Honor and Below, among others. He played a detective with psychological problems who commits suicide in the season three finale of CSI: Miami, and a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder on Criminal Minds.

He appeared in the 2010 Warner Bros. film, The Losers, based on the graphic novel from DC Comics. McCallany also was the star of the 2011 FX television series, Lights Out, playing an aging boxer ("Patrick 'Lights' Leary") forced out of retirement and into a comeback bid to regain the heavyweight title, despite having pugilistic dementia.

McCallany is a writer and producer of the film version of the true-life story of Doreen Giuliano, a Brooklyn wife and mother, who claims her son John Giuca was wrongfully convicted of murder after being targeted by a corrupt prosecutor. Giuliano's attempts to prove her son's innocence was optioned by a major network.

McCallany co-starred as a villain in Paramount Animation's first mostly live-action film, Monster Trucks (2016).

Filmography