Key Points
Neal McDonough says Luke Perry took his family in during a dark time in his career.
The Yellowstone actor was drinking heavily after Hollywood allegedly turned its back on him.
McDonough recalls Perry’s kindness before he was able to get back on his feet.
Neal McDonough said that despite being blackballed by Hollywood, he still had solid friends in the industry who had his back.
McDonough was labeled a “religious nut bag” by Hollywood for refusing to kiss costars on screen, he said in an interview with Fox News Digital published on Tuesday. He struggled to book a job and ended up drinking heavily to cope, losing his family’s home and belongings in the aftermath.
“What time is the bar open? That was generally my thought process back then,” McDonough told the outlet.
“I was, you know, fired from a show because I wouldn’t kiss a woman,” McDonough said. “No one would hire me because they thought I was this religious nut bag, which is that I love my wife [Ruvé McDonough] so much. And no one can understand it, no one could understand it.”
While in the midst of a dark time, Neal found kindness in his friend and late actor Luke Perry, who allowed the McDonoughs to live in his Los Angeles home after they lost theirs. Perry died at the age of 52 in 2019 from a massive ischemic stroke.
“Luke saw me one night at a premiere and he saw I was a mess,” Neal recalled. “He’s like, ‘What’s going on with you? I hear things aren’t going so great.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ And I opened up to him and he was like, ‘Why don’t you stay at my house? I don’t live in there anymore. It’s right by your house in Hancock Park. Stay there for as long as you want.’ I was like, ‘You mean it?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, here’s the keys.'”
McDonough added that he had recently booked a gig on Justified after creator Graham Yost also heard he was struggling, but that Perry’s gesture meant a lot to him in that moment.
“I still didn’t think I was worth anything because I failed my family,” McDonough told Fox News Digital. “I failed Ruvé, my five kids, that I lost our house. I lost all the beautiful things that were the shiny widgets that I had accumulated, [they] were all taken away from me. And that crucifixion caused me so much inner pain because I made it all about me. How could I let the team down?”
As his family picked up the pieces, Neal said Ruvé motivated him to quit drinking: “She grabbed me and says, ‘It’s us or the bottle, you choose. And I never looked back.”
Now, the McDonoughs work together as producing partners on projects based on “family, faith, and celebrating freedom,” including Jimmy, Boon, The Warrant: Breaker’s Law, Homestead, and The Last Rodeo.
Ruvé and Neal McDonough at the premiere of ‘Normal’ in April
Credit: Olivia Wong/WireImage
Last year, Ruvé walked back Neal’s initial comments on the industry bailing on him, insisting “the right people found Neal and put him in the right place.”
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“We want to say, ‘Thank you, Hollywood,'” Ruvé told TMZ in July during a joint interview with her husband of nearly 25 years.
“I don’t like how people are saying that Hollywood turned its back on Neal,” Ruvé said. “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 now 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.”
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