Five years ago, Harry O’Reilly was standing in the rain, selling newspapers on the entrance ramp to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Now he makes small talk with Anthony Hopkins and Billy Crystal at exclusive Hollywood parties. Despite the trendy “shades,” and smooth diction, O’Reilly remains a New York working stiff at heart. He commutes to L.A. to do Homefront and lives in Manhattan (to be near his six-year-old daughter, Laura Marie; he shares joint custody with her mom)
Unlike the Arnie Beckers and Greg Sumners of the world, O’Reilly’s TV character, Charlie Hailey, is strictly the blue-collar, what-you-see-is-what-you-get type. O’Reilly felt a connection right off. “I’m a lot like Charlie,” he admits. “I just want to settle down, have a family and spend my life with the woman I love.”
A policeman’s son, O’Reilly grew up in Marine Park, Brooklyn. (He has three older sisters and one younger brother.) His parents split up when he was young, but as O’Reilly insists, “They both stayed dedicated to their children.” Still, his early years were rough, and by adolescence, trouble was routine. “I was a barroom brawler,” he admits, “a rough-and-tumble kid. I was a nice guy, but I was a hard ass.” As a high school freshman, he transferred from public school in Brooklyn to Catholic school in Manhattan, just to play basketball. It was an eye-opener. “I didn’t know what detention was,” he laughs, “but I found out. If you talked in class or made a ruckus, they put a little detention slip on your desk. By the end of the first week, I had twenty-five of them! Finally, I got the heave-ho.” (He returned to school in Brooklyn and dropped out, but then he earned a high school equivalency diploma.) Once out of school, he played semipro football for the Brooklyn Mariners, sold watches on the street and hawked newspapers. Being a “newsie” was tough. “I’d get up at 4:30 a.m., drive down to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge [which links Brooklyn with Staten Island] and sell commuters the [Daily] News and the [New York] Post. At night, I’d meet everyone down at the Battery Tunnel and sell papers there. I did it for ten months and made $35 a shift. Snow days were rotten, but people would bring me hot chocolate and buttered rolls in the morning.”
Not all customers were angels-in-transit. “There were these four guys right out of Mean Streets who carpooled,” O’ Reilly recalls. “Every morning they’d say, ‘Gimme the Post’ with this real attitude. One morning, I wasn’t in the mood. So I growled, ‘Here, take your paper.’ The next thing I know, they jumped out of the car and pounced on me. They got a couple of cheap shots in, but I held my own. After that, I became buddies with them. They’d wave to me every day and say, ‘Hey, you hangin’ in there?”‘
Nevertheless, life in the exact-change lane didn’t hold much appeal. “I was twenty-one, and I felt like I was going nowhere,” he remembers. “What I really wanted to do was act. One morning, I was at the bridge selling my newspapers, and I just started crying. Something came over me. I went inside to this bathroom where the cops hung out, sat in a stall and cried for about twenty minutes.
That catharsis prompted him to enroll in Central Connecticut State College, where he studied drama with Dr. Victor Finizio and trained professionally with the late Geraldine Page. He made his movie debut in Hamburger Hill and did comic turns on The Ben Stiller Show.
His gift for improvisation nearly cost him his job on Homefront. “I was so used to doing Ben’s show, he recalls, that when I tried out for Homefront, I ad-libbed and paraphrased. It made the producers cringe. They said, ‘We really like him, but he’s got to say our words. This is a period piece. It has to be word perfect.’ After getting the job, he didn’t celebrate. For one thing, his girlfriend was back in New York. For another, he’d just been robbed. “They took my money, clothes, everything,” he says. “All I had left was $20 and a plane ticket home.”
Since then, things have picked up. During his first few months in prime time, he was a little “scared to enjoy success,” but now he’s mellowing. Last season, his daughter, Laura Marie, spent two weeks visiting him in L.A. She was on the set so much she became part of the crew,” he laughs. The geographic separations are draining, but she “knows that Daddy loves her. I write and call all the time.”
The separations are equally hard on romance. For the past year, O’Reilly has been dating actress Alison Bartlett. They met on an ABC After School Special called It’s Only Rock And Roll. They fell in love watching Citizen Kane. O’Reilly thinks Charlie has a real message for male HF viewers: “There are guys out there watching with their girlfriends. They see Charlie; he’s a guy’s guy, not a wimp, and doesn’t run away from commitment. Maybe they’ll see him and think nurturing a relationship is worth it. I know I do.”
Birthday: July 28
Full Name: Henry Thomas O’Reilly III
You May Remember Him As: The crooked fire inspector who gets murdered in Billy Bathgate.
You’d Be Surprised To Know: He won a tenth-grade poetry contest at James Madison High School in Brooklyn.
What He Splurges On: CDs. (“I’m a big Van Morrison fan.”)
What He Does For Luck Before Taping: “Say a rosary or a few prayers.”
On Co-Star Sammi Davis-Voss (Caroline): “She’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.”
On Co-Star Giuliana Santini (Gina): “She’s my best buddy on the show. She’s always asking me for lunch money. She owes me about five lunches.”
On Co-Star Tammy Lauren (Ginger): “She’s totally committed to her work, drinks a lot of coffee and smokes too many cigarettes. I’m always busting her chops to quit.”