A look of relief appears on Noah Galvin’s face as he turns to glance at his publicist after the tape recorder is turned off. It’s “The Real O’Neals” breakout star’s first interview since making headlines over the summer for his candid comments about Hollywood’s glass closet and his opinions on fellow gay actors.
“I hope that we’re in a place in the world where it shouldn’t matter,” Galvin says when asked about what it means as a gay man (he came out at 14) to play a gay character, the 16-year-old Kenny O’Neal, on prime-time television. “I’m an actor and I’m able to do a lot of things and play a lot of characters. I’ve talked before about L.A., and I think a lot of people in L.A. are fearful of coming out of the closet and fearful of playing characters because they think it will limit their careers in some way. I took this role with a gung-ho attitude and I’m going at it with a gung-ho attitude.”
The reflective tone comes as Galvin steps back into the spotlight with the return of the ABC sitcom about a teenager who comes out to his Chicago-bred Catholic family led by matriarch Eileen O’Neal (played by Martha Plimpton). It may seem the actor was plucked from obscurity for the part, but Galvin began cutting his teeth at the age of 10 in Off-Broadway and regional theater productions, where he earned a Kevin Kline Award for the 2006 Repertory Theatre of St. Louis production of the musical “Ace.”
However, when it came to screen roles, Galvin had less luck, spending the past three years flying between New York and L.A. to test for shows. “I was always playing the weird best friend,” he says. The actor is the first to admit that auditions terrify him—“to my core,” Galvin says. “Auditioning is a skill. There are actors who are not very talented but know how to audition and know how to be really confident in the room and are confident enough to be able to charm the pants off anybody.”
Eventually, Galvin found himself auditioning for two parts at the beginning of 2015. One was all too familiar: an autistic best friend on a Fox show. That audition, in front of “30 dudes in suits not willing to laugh,” went terribly, he admits. The other was the lead on “The Real O’Neals,” something he felt certain he could land. “I’ve been getting breakdowns for 10 years of my life and I never before so immediately felt like, I can easily book this,” Galvin says, revealing that he responded to an initial audition appointment with “This is mine.”
But the actor didn’t run off with the part. Executive producer Todd Holland liked him, but it was clear he didn’t know how to work in front of a camera. “I was like, ‘Don’t I know it,’ ” Galvin remembers. Three days after collaborating with the director to create a usable audition tape, he landed his big break while eating Chinese food on his aunt’s bed in New York City.
Now in its second season, which premiered Oct. 11, coincidentally on National Coming Out Day—a celebration of coming out as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or as an ally—“The Real O’Neals” is tackling tougher issues facing the LGBTQ community. The message of the show’s premiere: Don’t judge people for how they come out. Instead, celebrate their bravery in doing so.
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Although it may be easy to draw parallels between Galvin’s last interview and the Season 2 premiere’s topic, the actor says there isn’t any direct relationship between the two. Once the writers realized the premiere was the same day as the annual LGBTQ awareness day, they wrote an episode reflecting upon how easy it was for Kenny to come out in Season 1. “They thought it would be interesting to put Kenny’s situation up against a person who would be kicked out of the house,” Galvin says of the premiere, in which his character, thinking of himself as a “gay Moses,” starts an LGBTQ afterschool club to encourage other students to follow his lead. Reality sets in when fellow student Allison reveals that coming out would have dire consequences for her.
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It’s a message that Dan Savage, LGBTQ activist, executive producer, and the inspiration behind the show, reiterated on set from day one. “Kids get kicked out of their homes every single day for being gay and coming out,” Galvin recalls him saying. “He understood that’s not the story we’re telling, nor is that a sitcom storyline. But if we weren’t going to do that, then we at least had to acknowledge it.”
Production on Season 2 began amid rumors that ABC had cut the episode order in response to Galvin’s interview, which also included his light admonishment of the network for the show’s last-minute renewal. “There wasn’t that much buzzing behind the scenes,” executive producer Casey Johnson told a room full of reporters during the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour in August. In fact, by the time the cast returned to set, the gaffe was very much behind them.
“For us, as people who play his fake family, our response to that was to be present for him so he could have a place to go where he could say, ‘Holy shit. I forgot where I was and who I was talking to. I just was running off at the mouth.’ And we can say, ‘We’re here for you. We can help you,’ ” co-star Plimpton says, adding, “Noah is so smart and, for a lack of a better word, precocious.”
A former child star with over 30 years in the business, Plimpton says the moment is something every performer in the spotlight has experienced. “We’ve all given interviews where we said something idiotic or out of turn,” she says. “We’ve all done it. Everyone. And anyone who says they haven’t is full of it.”
Both born and raised in New York City, Plimpton and Galvin grew up four blocks from each other on the Upper West Side, which is why they’ve gravitated together on set. There’s a familiarity between them, despite being generations apart. “We had immediate chemistry,” Galvin says. “One day, I want to be as smart as her.”
Plimpton serves as something of a mentor for Galvin, taking him under her wing as he navigates a career on network TV. “I feel protective of him,” she says. “I feel like it’s important for me to be not just a good colleague and acting partner but somebody who can provide some insight into things that he’s just now experiencing.”
While there’s still a lot of learning and growing to do—“There’s no stopping,” Galvin says—he feels more confident going into Season 2. “With the first season, everybody’s trying to find each other, trying to find ‘it,’ ” he says, acknowledging that as a cast, they found their groove after the first eight episodes. Now, “everyone’s more at ease and more at home.”
And in terms of his craft, he’s found affirmation in the audition process, recently doing chemistry tests for Kenny’s new boyfriend, played by Sean Grandillo. “I asked to be able to do that because there are people that have been cast on our show that were like those people,” he says, referring to the confident auditioners. “I’m learning to be that way. I’m learning to have more confidence in the room.... I feel like I nailed it pretty good.”
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