Kevin Doyle was hoping to pass through the Chicago Police Academy undetected, just another nervous recruit, learning to protect and to serve.
But before the first day of classes was over, an instructor had singled him out.
“Hey, I know you,” the man said.
“You do?”
The instructor looked perplexed: “I can’t place the face.” But the next day he returned to class, his confidence restored. He said only two words — “The Untouchables” — before launching into Doyle’s short but memorable scene as a slow-witted police recruit in the 1987 film starring Kevin Costner and Sean Connery.
Doyle’s classmates turned to look at him: What?
“Yeah,” Doyle said. “Yeah, that was me.”
Art imitates life — and life repays the compliment — in the strange world of Kevin Doyle, a Chicago police officer who has appeared in TV shows such as “Early Edition” and “Dear John,” the movie “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” and Chicago plays including “I’m Not Rappaport” with Garrett Morris and this season’s political comedy “Early and Often.”
There are other cops who act, but few who do so professionally and probably none who can claim to have played a Chicago Police Academy recruit in a major motion picture before entering the real-life Chicago Police Academy.
Doyle’s story is one of colorful contrasts and oddball contradictions: Some days he wears stage makeup and other days he arrests drug dealers. When he first started police work, his acting friends would see him in uniform and assume he had landed another in a series of police roles. “What are you working on?” they would ask. When he played a cop on “Early Edition” last year, a police pal working set security saw him in costume and thought he was just reporting for duty.
But beyond the jokes and double-takes lies a serious theme: Stage-struck since early childhood, Doyle, 43, fought for his acting dream for nearly two decades, hauling his family to Los Angeles and Atlantic City, submitting to hundreds of auditions, digging ditches and working construction jobs in sub-zero weather to make ends meet.
Still, he struggled financially in a business where, as Walter Matthau once put it, “all you need are 50 good breaks.” In 1997, at the age of 40, Kevin Doyle scaled back his dream and took the police test.
The job has been a good fit – Doyle likes the excitement and camaraderie – but it also represents a compromise between artistic ideals and financial reality.
“You have this passion, the theater’s in your blood, you have to do it, yada, yada, yada,” Doyle says. But at some point, he says, you find yourself traveling cross-country to audition for a five-line role in a TV show you wouldn’t let your cat watch.
Or as Doyle puts it, “There’s that fine line between tenacity and victimhood in the arts: How much victimhood can you stand?”
If policing and acting are two separate nations, one dedicated to order, the other enamored of free expression, then Kevin Doyle (a.k.a. Kevin Michael Doyle, his official actors’ union name, a.k.a. “Hollywood,” his unofficial police station nickname) holds duel citizenship.
The man who greets a reporter at his Northwest Chicago apartment is Doyle the actor, a tall, pale figure with graying red hair who initiates a little polite chitchat about local architecture before moving on to the task at hand. If you listen carefully, you can catch him saying “real acting is the theater” or “theater is what you come back to, it’s what feeds your soul.”
But Doyle, a Second City comedy troupe alum, doesn’t linger on such observations; even in actor mode, he’s more the high school athlete who can act than the drama club kid who lives for the stage. With a resonant drawl, classic cop hair — short on the sides, longer on top and brushed back — and a frown that hovers between disapproval and perplexity, he’s a born straight man: the father, the coach, the old-time pol, the cop.
Doyle’s roots in the world of law enforcement run deeper than his two years on the force would suggest. He grew up on the South Side, surrounded by cops, firefighters, and other city workers. His best friend’s father was a police sergeant. His cousin Bill was a canine cop.
But if police work was familiar to Doyle as a kid, drama was a way of life. The fourth of five children of Rosemary Doyle, a homemaker, and Bill “Red” Doyle, a construction supervisor who went on to become a union leader, Doyle was bitten by the drama bug at about age 5 and never seemed to recover.
“Oh my God, he was, like, sick. Like, he would be in a special school, now,” says his brother Jimmy, 35, an actor in Los Angeles.
As a child, Kevin Doyle had a different costume for every game he played: fireman, cowboy, racecar driver. By age 10, he was recording movies with a tape recorder. When the movie “Patton” came out a few years later, he saw it 30 times and memorized most of the lines. He used to dress up as Patton and act out scenes from the movie.
His best friend, Mike Burke, now a judge in DuPage County, would play Patton’s second-in-command. Jimmy Doyle, who was eight years younger, was cast as a dying soldier.
In some ways, the Doyle household– blue collar, strict, outwardly conventional — was an unlikely hotbed of dramatic activity. But if Red Doyle was the head of the homeowners association, he was also the neighborhood Irish tenor, singing at weddings and funerals. Before Rosemary Doyle was a homemaker, she was an actress who appeared in numerous high school plays.
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Doyle continued to pursue his thespian interests at Northern Illinois University, where he took pre-law courses, acted in plays, and did sketches and parodies on college radio.
His college roommate Dan Castellaneta, now the voice of Homer Simpson, recalls that Doyle was funny, intense, and “a pretty tough guy” who “was not one to shy away from a confrontation with anybody.” The two young actors squared off against each other doing impressions — Bogart, Pacino, George C. Scott, Jimmy Stewart — and soon became friends.
After college, Doyle joined The New Globe Theatre, a New York repertory company where he sharpened his acting skills performing Shakespeare, Ibsen and Tennessee Williams.
And in 1986, after three auditions, Doyle landed the part of the dim police recruit in “The Untouchables.” The role is small, but Doyle makes the most of it, his face a mask of slack-jawed confusion as he muddles through an interview with a veteran cop played by Sean Connery.
“I wanna ask you something, why do you want to join the force, hm?” Connery asks.
“To protect and, and, to protect and serve, to protect and . . . “
“Please don’t search for the yearbook answer, eh? Just tell me what you think.”
“Well, what I think, I could help with the force.”
“That you could help?”
“The force. With crime.”
As Doyle exits, Connery quips, “There goes the next chief of police.”
By the time “The Untouchables” came out Doyle had been dating Mary Lou Ricciardi, a former waitress, for four years. In 1989 they married in a ceremony guests describe as simple and inexpensive — Castellaneta, the best man, recalls that the bride poured the coffee at the reception — but intensely moving.
“There wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” says Jimmy Doyle.
There wasn’t much discussion about whether Mary Lou, a warm and lively counterpoint to her somewhat reserved husband, would support his acting career. “We were young,” he says with a laugh.
A few weeks after the wedding, Mary Lou moved to Los Angeles, where Kevin was writing TV pilots. She followed him to Atlantic City with their daughter Claire, then only 3 months, when he did a revue in one of the casinos.
In 1986, Doyle had joined Second City e.t.c., a division of the comedy troupe that helped launch John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd. The Tribune called him “sublimely smooth” and “the marvelous Kevin Michael Doyle” when he appeared in Second City’s 1992 spoof of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” In the mid-1990s, Doyle landed a guest star role as a corrupt cop on the TV show “The Untouchables.”
He also worked a series of dead-end day jobs in construction and security. Still, the creditors kept calling.
One day in March, 1996, Doyle found himself 100 feet off the ground at a construction site in Keokuk, Iowa. His childhood friends were moving up in the world, and here he was five hours from home, installing pipes at a corn-processing plant. It had rained and sleeted the night before, and he slipped on ice as he worked in temperatures of –35 degrees.
“I was pushing 40 at the time, and I was thinkin,’ Man, I gotta do something else. This is really getting old,” he says.
Given his background and role models, his dislike of desk jobs and his desire to help people, police work seemed an obvious choice.
There was the inevitable teasing when he entered the police academy: “He lands that big role, he’ll be dumping us in no time,” his friend police officer Dave Diaz would say.
And the occasional dig continued when Doyle was assigned to the 18th District, which includes trendy Old Town and the Cabrini-Green housing project. Nicknames are common among cops, and Doyle was hoping for something streetwise and tough, maybe “Popeye” Doyle, like the narcotics cop in “The French Connection.”
No such luck. His fellow officers greet him with a hearty, “Hey, Hollywood!” Doyle sighs good-naturedly: “I get that all the time.” But for the most part, he says, he is treated as just another moonlighting cop.
Doyle writes a lot of traffic tickets and responds to a lot of shoplifting calls. But he has also chased drug dealers and wrestled them to the ground. A life in the theater remains his ideal, but he says he’d rather be a real-life cop more than play one on TV. He even praises the 6 p.m. shift; it allows him to spend more time with his family.During an afternoon interview, he pauses repeatedly to monitor the activities of his daughters Claire, 11, and Eve, 1. At one point, he excuses himself to change Eve’s diaper. Later, he turns his attention to Claire: “Whattaya got on your eye there. What is that?” Satisfied that it’s just hair, not a bruise, he continues: “Go ahead and wash up, though. God, you’re getting so tall.”
Working the night shift, Kevin Doyle is a long way from the lights of Broadway — but not as far as one might think. Asked how many actors there are in the Chicago Police Department, deputy director of news affairs Patrick Camden doesn’t miss a beat: “I have 13,500 police officers who are actors. They’re actors every time they go on a call.”
Police officers have to reassure victims, defuse tense situations, command the respect of criminals and charm disgruntled taxpayers — sometimes all within the space of a few minutes. And Doyle can do it all, according to his co-worker Chicago police officer Stephen Balcerzak: “He can be anyone to anyone at any time.”
Friends and family had a wide range of reactions to Doyle’s day job. His brother Jimmy says he was surprised and scared. Second City producer emeritus Joyce Sloane says she thought it made perfect sense: “Kevin’s family is very important to him and he wanted the security of a steady job.”
Castellaneta looks to the future: “He’s an incredibly talented guy, and I do think he’ll get acting work again.”
And Mary Lou Doyle sounds relieved: “This has been a really great thing for him, for both of us, because I don’t worry; at least he’s feeling challenged and fulfilled and he can still act on the side, and hopefully, someday . . . ” She pauses and looks away: “It will work out.”
Doyle himself is harder to pin down, more the taciturn cop than the effusive actor when it comes to discussing his artistic ambitions.
He recently completed a high profile six weeks, while on furlough, filling in as Flannery, the corrupt ward boss, in Famous Door Theatre’s well-reviewed political comedy “Early and Often.” The New York Times featured him prominently in a roundup of Chicago theater. State representatives and former Gov. Jim Thompson applauded his work.
But at the end of his police department vacation, Doyle left the show.
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Asked if he is still serious about acting, he says, “I think I am, but I’m serious about my life, too. I’m serious about my family eating. That’s kind of the No. 1 thing.”