Donal Logue is a busy guy – he stars as Brendan Donovan on BBC’s hit detective drama Copper, he’ll be a key player in the upcoming season of Sons of Anarchy in a guest role as retired US Marshal Lee Toric , and he’s currently on location in Ireland, filming the second season of History’s Vikings. With so many projects on his plate, does he ever find time to take a day off?
“Well, there wasn’t for a spell,” he said via telephone during a break from the Vikings shoot. “It was pretty crazy when things were overlapping a lot, but it was great. It’s kind of what you live for.”
Logue is no stranger to television, having starred in numerous projects over the years, but being featured in three different series on three different networks in such a short span of time isn’t something that many people can boast about. Logue’s ability to transition seamlessly from one project to another is a testament to his versatility, and his appearance on Sons of Anarchy fulfills a desire several years in the making.
“Kurt Sutter had asked me to join the show, and he had spoken to me for the last few seasons,” Logue recalls. “And it was maddeningly frustrating because the last couple of times I had spoken to him, I had just agreed to do pilots, both of which didn’t go. And even if you had a sense that they weren’t going, I couldn’t officially join Sons of Anarchy because there was a chance that they would go.”
It may have taken a while for everything to fall into place, but fans of the show will certainly be glad for it, as the presence of Lee Toric provides a new antagonist for SAMCRO, one with a very personal vendetta and a career in law enforcement that has left him with a tremendous arsenal of resources at his disposal. As Logue tells us, “there’s no such thing as dirty pool,” and Toric will seemingly use any means necessary to dismantle the club.
“I’m not sure how much I can give away, spoiler-wise,” he says warily. “His sister was brutally murdered by someone who is part of an organized criminal organization, so he has an extra special incentive to go after SAMCRO. And something may be going on with him, in terms of why he’s popping so many pills. He’s getting older and he’s getting desperate. The 35-year-old Lee Toric might not behave this way.”
Logue made an immediate impact when he appeared at the end of the fifth season, dressed in a prison jumpsuit and assaulting incarcerated club member Otto Delaney (Kurt Sutter) with a guard’s baton. “You know it’s unorthodox right off the bat,” admits Logue, who goes on to say that he didn’t realize exactly how dark the role of Lee Toric would be.
“I love those people, and they’re such a joy to work with,” he says. “It’s funny because, you know, like a lot of things in life, the world that they portray and who they are as people are very different things, but I remember being so disturbed leaving work by what we were doing. And it’s rare, you know what I mean? I have a really good ability to separate the walls of what I’m doing in my job life… but that was some disturbing stuff.”
Coincidentally, Logue’s introduction to the Sons of Anarchy audience bears striking similarities to his first appearance on Vikings, having his character established at the end of a season and being set up as a major antagonist for the following year. Logue describes King Horik as “the most powerful political ruler of that time,” and was intrigued by the real-life history behind the character.
“Horik was the first real Viking king of which a decent amount is known historically,” he explains. “He was a real astute, nimble political operator. [When his diplomatic style] requires some kind of flexibility, he’s the willow, and when it requires machtpolitik, he’s the oak. If he had to be two-faced, he’d be two-faced. Again, the end justifies any means possible.”
Horik’s position of power not only makes him a powerful ally for Vikings protagonist Ragnar Lothbrok, but Horik also sees the potential to use Ragnar’s own fame as a way to strengthen his grip on the realm, “To have someone like Ragnar Lothbrok, who’s kind of rising in fame and whose exploits are known, to pledge fealty to him, he sees him as an opportunity to increase his wealth, power, fame, et cetera.”
Never one to rest on his laurels, Logue already has his next project lined up, which will see him stepping away from the screen in order to focus on a different art form. “I sold my first novel to Harper Collins Canada earlier in the year,” he reveals. The book is called Agua, and he says that an agent described it in cinematic terms as Stand By Me meets Chinatown.
“I’m doing my rewrites now,” he continues. “That’s been a huge learning curve, but super fun and exciting. That’s kinda what I wanna do… It’s a coming-of-age novel about a 13-year-old boy on the Mexican border who finds a body in a canal, and it leads to the unraveling of a Chinatown-like conspiracy to take water from California farmers to send to the big city.”
Agua will be hitting bookshelves sometime in late 2014, but don’t expect Logue to stop working anytime soon. He says that he made the decision very early in his career not to limit himself to just one thing, a philosophy that has obviously served him very well over the years. “I’ve certainly never flown to great heights of fame or any of that kind of stuff,” he tells us before saying goodbye. “But I’ve always really enjoyed the fact that for some reason, I’ve been allowed to go between David Fincher movies and sitcoms, which has been an incredible gift. I hope to continue mixing it up like that.”
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Sons of Anarchy premieres on Tuesday, September 10, exclusively on FX. History’s Vikings will return in early 2014.
1 Comment
he great in the show he keep my heart beating when I see him he such a bad man