Modern Family star considered joining the mafia before getting big break

Modern Family star Ed O’Neill reveals his brush with organized crime before he hit his big break in the comedy acting world.

Modern Family is one of the most acclaimed network comedies as the series ran for 11 season and gathered numerous awards.

The cast of the show was a mix of fresh new talent and old veteran actors, one being Ed O’Neil, who got his big break as Al Bundy on the hit series Married…with Children.

However, before getting his big break, O’Neil had a brush with the criminal underground as he recently revealed he almost essentially joined the mob before deciding on an acting career.

O’Neil almost traded comedy fame for street corners

The Modern Family patriarch recently met up with his on-screen son Jesse Tyler Ferguson for Ferguson’s Dinner On Me podcast where he recounted his pre-acting days and how it almost led him into a criminal lifestyle.

Back in his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio in 1969, O’Neil was extremely low on money, so a friend of him offered him a chance to make some cash as the actor recounted“We’re driving and he said, ‘How you doing? You know, you, you got cut, you got no money.’ I said, ‘No, I’m broke. You know, I don’t know what I’m going to do.’”

O’Neil then reminisced on how his friend took him to a local bar where he could witness the friend’s method in person saying, “He started talking to the bartender. He says, ‘I’m looking for this kid, his name is whatever, Demko, his name is Jimmy Demko, do you know him?’ And the guy says, ‘No, it doesn’t ring a bell.’ So he gives him $20, and he says, ‘Look, he’s an old friend of mine, I haven’t seen him in years, you know, I’m looking to reconnect, but I’d like to surprise him. So if he comes in again, you can call this number, you can reach me.”

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After watching his friend in action, a job offer was then leveled as O’Neil recalled, “We left and he said, ‘You can do this kind of stuff for me, you know, I’ll protect you. I’ll give you easy stuff. Just you collect here. You do that. You run, you drop something off here and there. You know you may have to lean on a guy. You’re good at that. You can make some good money.’”

O’Neil made it clear that the opportunity was not an easy one to turn down as he was completely strapped for cash, but told his friend that he was unsure because he was “leaving town to pursue this acting thing.”

The star even consulted his father on the offer, to which his father said to pass on it as he “couldn’t do time [as you’d] have a hard time being in jail.”

This seemed to be enough for O’Neil as he then rang up his friend and told him, “I’m going to New York. Yeah. I’m going to try this, this other thing,” and just a few years later O’Neil booked a role in Al Pacino’s Cruising and Christopher Walken’s The Dogs of War, which then led to his career to flourish.