Danny McCarthy

His family back in St. Louis proudly tunes in each week to watch the youngest of six kids in the action-drama series about a man who gets himself sent to prison for bank robbery so that he can help his brother break out after being convicted to death row for a crime he didn’t commit. McCarthy’s mother has even made prison hats for the family so that each of McCarthy’s older siblings, his parents and all his nieces and nephews (who, McCarthy says, “certainly should not be watching the show”) are suitably costumed for the show’s setting. “That’s the cutest thing ever,” McCarthy concedes with a laugh.

The 36-year-old Chicago actor auditioned last year for the pilot, first reading for one of the starring roles on the show. In the callback, he was asked to read for Hale, a character that at the time was planned for only two or three episodes. But even that was good news to McCarthy. “It sounded a lot more desirable to me than waiting tables that week,” he said. “I was elated to get it but I really wasn’t in the position to pick and choose about what I’d rather have. I just got lucky, basically, and it worked out well.”

The day McCarthy found out his role had been expanded to a 10-episode arc was the same one on which he was told he did not land a national commercial campaign he had auditioned for in New York and Los Angeles. It was down to him and one other guy and they went with the competition. It didn’t sting quite so badly after McCarthy’s agent at Aria called back again with the news that Hale was going to have a life beyond the initial couple of episodes.

McCarthy describes the character of Hale as a bad guy with a conscience. “I’m lucky in that my character is very three-dimensional,” he said. “I get to have a clear emotional arc for my character. I’m not a bad guy or a good guy. My character goes through a series of changes. His whole arc is basically a crisis of conscience.”

It’s the kind of nuance McCarthy can play well. “As an actor, I always find that he makes very subtle but very clear choices,” said Steppenwolf’s Ed Sobel, who has directed McCarthy in staged readings and in Brett Neveu’s American Dead at American Theater Company.

Surely it helps that McCarthy is, as Sobel puts it, capable of being “immediately empathetic, even if he’s playing a character who is not necessarily even intended to be the protagonist or the person [with] whom the audience will [identify].”

Sobel said he casts McCarthy because “he’s a very, very truthful actor. There’s just not a dishonest bone in his acting body. I also think that he brings an understanding of not only what his character’s objectives are, but also what the needs of the scene are.”

McCarthy’s learning even more about character objectives and the needs of the action overall on the set for “Prison Break.”

“It’s just a huge learning experience for me because I haven’t been on that many sets for a good amount of time,” he said. “Also each show, each week, it’s directed by a different person so I get to work with a whole bunch of directors with different styles. It’s a lot of fun and I feel like I’m taking a lot of work away from it.”

Acting on TV is more difficult than stage acting for McCarthy. “It’s a lot more immediate,” he said. “You have to come up with emotions in a heartbeat as opposed to building up to that, like if you’re having some sort of breakdown, the director and the grips aren’t really going to allow you the time to sit and dwell. It’s “action’ and then you do your shit and it better be good.”

Stage acting will always be more satisfying, McCarthy said. He enjoys “the whole process of the rehearsal and really finding out about the character, and working with the character throughout the run, and learning different things in each performance, and the satisfaction of having an audience. Of course, it goes both ways. If you suck you can feel the audience is not with you.”

McCarthy went to Webster University Conservatory of Theatre Arts where he studied contemporary and classical theatre as well as on-camera acting and stage combat. Acting had not been a great ambition for the young McCarthy. He went to Webster because that’s where his mother worked and he could attend for free. He auditioned for the Conservatory after doing a few plays in high school.

After college, he decided to pursue a stage career largely out of habit. “I just kind of had some fun during college and got out and I thought I’d give it a whirl,” he said. “I basically did it because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I also really have no skills to speak of, so I thought I’d try the acting.”

He moved to New York City first but after a year there he moved back to the Midwest. “I wanted to act and I was just not emotionally ready for New York, so I came to Chicago.

“I didn’t really have any success for years, but I did enough stage work that I wasn’t always waiting tables. By the time I was 30, I figured I’ve been doing this so long there’s really nothing else I can do,” he said.

Much of the work he’s done has been pretty good. He was in Famous Door’s production of Early and Often and Roadworks’ production of Serenading Louie, among many others during the past 14 years.

“The most satisfying play I did in Chicago was Serenading Louie,” he said. “All the actors were great, and Abigail Desser was a great director and it was just so unbelievably gut-wrenching that it was cathartic to perform.”

Early and Often was more of a good time. “It was just a party every night,” he said. “It was just a great cast and so much fun to do.”

But McCarthy hasn’t been on stage in Chicago since last season’s Take Me Out, produced by About Face. He’s been doing mostly voice work to pay the rent and says he has no concrete future plans at this point.

It’s not as if the “Prison Break” role has been a break-out role for him quite yet. “I haven’t really been showcased in the show that much, so my phone isn’t going crazy,” he said. “Hopefully, maybe after a few more episodes, something will happen.”

Currently he’s plugging Alleyball an independent movie he shot in Chicago this past summer with Larry Joe Campbell of “According to Jim” and “MADtv” star Keegan-Michael Key. “It’s going to be the Funniest movie ever created,” McCarthy says of the film, directed by Danny Consiglio, a good friend who McCarthy grew up with.

In the meantime, fame, or even the approximation of it, hasn’t changed McCarthy. “He’s still down here pulling his weight,” said Guy Van Swearingen, artistic director of A Red Orchid Theatre, where McCarthy is an ensemble member.

Van Swearingen describes McCarthy as just a “regular guy,” off stage. On stage, said Van Swearingen, McCarthy is “a great listener. He’s a fine actor, a great actor, very well focused on stage and very direct in purpose, and he’s fun and exciting to watch, too. That may sound a bit generic but it’s tough to find someone who is all of those things.”

Sobel adds, “He’s terrific to work with. He’s got a wonderful sense of humor. He’s a terrific professional, really dedicated, I think, to the craft and I just enjoy having him in the room.”

As for McCarthy, what’s his advice for actors trying to break into television? “Get really lucky and try not to be a dick,” he said. Asked whether this was the advice just for breaking into the field or whether it should sustain an actor throughout his career, the “regular guy” confirmed, “I think you should always try not to be a dick.”