‘Desperate Housewives’ villain revisits the dark side on ‘Yellowstone’

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For someone who’s notorious for playing villains, crazies and assorted oddballs, Neal McDonough could not be a straighter arrow.

 

He’s the ultimate stand-up guy, a family man who has five kids with Ruve, his wife of 16 years. He’s a staunch Catholic whose refusal to do love scenes cost him at least one job, the lead on the 2010 ABC series “Scoundrels.” Yet McDonough — currently playing sinister Malcolm Beck opposite Kevin Costner on “Yellowstone” — has found a way to have a career while protecting himself from the moral squalor of show business.

 

It helped that he abandoned LA for Canada. “As a devout Catholic, it was much better for my way of thinking and way of life than LA,” says McDonough. “It’s a very me-centered culture there. The way I was brought up is: family first, me second.”

 

McDonough, 53, had his first introduction to Vancouver in 2015 when Greg Berlanti asked him to play criminal mastermind Damien Darhk on the CW series “Arrow.” “We’re an hour south of Vancouver and it’s like a Norman Rockwell painting,” he says. “My wife loves it, my kids love it. I wanted a Massachusetts feeling.”

 

This summer he’s making his usual insidious impression on “Yellowstone” as Beck, one half of a brotherly duo who own all the gas station casinos in Montana. “You fill up your car, you go inside to pay and there are slot machines,” he says. “If you want to have a casino you have to go through the Beck brothers. Malcolm has a monopoly on gambling, liquor and gas stations all across Montana.”

 

Beck offers his services to John Dutton (Kevin Costner), a wealthy rancher at war with the Paradise Valley Casino and Condo, a development project spearheaded by Dan Jenkins (Danny Huston) and his Native American business partner, Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham). “John owns half of the valley and they want to build the casino on the edge of his property, which would overlook that fantastic ranch,” McDonough says. “John has his code and I have mine. Obviously they come to a head.”

 

 

With a large family to support, McDonough takes most of the jobs he’s offered. He has had stints on everything from “Project Blue Book,” “Van Helsing” and “Suits” to the upcoming second season of Netflix series “Altered Carbon,” which stars Anthony Mackie.

 

After working with the comic-strip caliber characters on “Arrow,” McDonough enjoyed testing his mettle against the cowboys represented by Costner, whom he describes as “the most rugged, handsome, John Wayne kind of guy. There’s isn’t an ounce of Botox in that face.”

 

Like many of the “Yellowstone” cast, McDonough was knocked out by the physical beauty of the Chief Joseph Ranch in Montana where the series films exteriors, but he still went home whenever possible. “I’m not very good being away from my wife,” he says. “When I go away on location, it’s more like prison. I don’t like to go out at all. I like to fly for a day or two and get home for 10 days.”

 

With Luke Grimes — who plays Costner’s son Kayce Dutton — reporting that one of the bulls used on set charged and broke one of the show’s cameras, it seems fair to ask McDonough if he worked with any livestock. “Yeah. I was with Cole Hauser,” he says, referring to the rugged character actor who plays “Yellowstone” ranch hand Rip Wheeler.

 

“I do comedy,” he says. “People don’t realize it. You never laugh so hard as when you laugh in church, at the most inappropriate times. That’s what I tap into for my villains. That to me is entertainment. I always wanted to be Ted Knight on ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show.’ If I had a poster of an actor on my wall, it would be Ted Baxter on the news.”