Memories From the Set: Michael Beach Reflects on ER, Third Watch, Quantum Leap and More
Tulsa King‘s Michael Beach says Season 2 — which begins streaming Sunday on Paramount+ — is even better than Season 1. And he’d know, given how much TV he’s appeared in over the course of his nearly 40-year career.
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Quantum Leap. Third Watch. ER. NCIS. The Blacklist. All of these are just a few of the entries on Beach’s resume, which TVLine asked him to think back on during a recent chat.
Ahead of the show’s return, Beach walked us through a few of his best-known roles, one of his more offbeat ones, and all three of his current gigs. Scroll down to hear what he has to say — oh, and speaking of which, here’s an expert tease to whet your Tulsa King appetite.
“There’s some nice bonding stuff that happens” coming up in the Sylvester Stallone-led series, Beach says. “There’s still the conflict that exists, and where it goes and what happens is such a cool thing. And they brought in some other good, strong actors for Stallone to mess with.”
Read on for more!
QUANTUM LEAP
One of Beach’s early TV gigs — playing a civil-rights leader in a 1965-set episode of Quantum Leap — taught him several memorable lessons about the biz. First: Just because a show is genre doesn’t mean it’s gimmicky. “Quantum Leap was trying to tackle really interesting, really provocative, really worthwhile subjects” such as the Klu Klux Klan’s terrorizing of Black voting advocates in the South, he says, remembering that one scene found him standing next to series lead Scott Bakula, both of them wearing nooses around their necks. Bakula himself provided Lesson #2: Give it your all. “He never had a moment’s break, because pretty much, he was in every scene,” Beach recalls. “And it was important to him that, regardless of what other people thought about the show, he was trying to make a good, quality show — which I thought it was.” Finally, after overhearing a child actor getting berated by her mother, he vowed to do whatever he could to make his fellow actors feel at ease on set. “To this day, I always try to go out of my way to make people comfortable, especially if I’m a regular on the set,” he says. “That is how we should be making product: We should be encouraging people and bringing people in, and giving them the opportunity to do their best.”
ER
When the NBC medical drama approached Beach about making his character, Al Boulet, HIV-positive, “I remember talking to George about it, to Clooney,” Beach says. The main topic of conversation: how the show would handle an AIDS storyline, given that few dramas had tackled the topic by that point in the mid-1990s. “The thing that ER did, which was unique, was that these characters were living with the problem, you know? They weren’t succumbing to it,” he says. “They were fighting through it and showing that you still had a life, and you still had value. That was the wonderful thing about it.” He remembers having detailed conversations with the show’s Powers That Be “about how sensitively they were going to deal with it, and to this day, I think that’s one of my favorite storylines,” he says, “just some of the most tender moments I’ve had on camera.”
A lighter, if more nerve-racking, aspect of playing Jeanie’s husband? The potential for being in one of the show’s many lengthy and continuous Steadicam shots… and maybe messing it all up. “A lot of that crazy, frenetic stuff was not really my storyline,” Beach recalls, but Al occasionally stopped by the hospital, and that was when the pressure was on. “There was this one time where they go through all of that, and near the end of the scene, I walk in and I have to say a small line, like, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’” Beach says. “You’re just petrified that you’re on your mark, and all this energy, that you don’t ruin the whole take at the very end of the take.” He says he feels lucky that he was never the reason for a massive start-over, “because after the first couple of times, there’s always grace… But after a couple of times of people messing up, that goodwill and that love? Just goodbye. It’s gone!”
THIRD WATCH
Beach played NYC Fire Department paramedic Monte “Doc” Parker throughout the NBC series’ six seasons, during which he became well-versed in performing medicine on the fly… and how sometimes, you’ve gotta fudge it for the cameras. “We always had consultants with us on set any time we were doing anything,” he says, remembering that the on-set advisors used to point out that real EMTs rarely run or jump on top of gurneys as they’re in motion. “The consultant would to, ‘No, we would never do that,’” Beach says, laughing, “and the director would go, ‘Well, that’s what we’ve got to do!’”
He adds: “Obviously, a big thing on ER and Third Watch is the pace, the style. That’s the energy. And some sometimes that [real-life stuff, just for the sake of making a TV show, would get pushed to the side… As much as possible, you have to try to combine what would really be done with what needs to be done for the shot.”
DEAD BOY DETECTIVES
In the recently cancelled Netflix fantasy series, Beach played a walrus stuck in a man’s body whose “deepest desire was to get back to the sea to his family, and he spent 200 years looking for potions and spells and whatever he could in order to achieve that,” he explains. (Accordingly, the character’s name was Tragic Mick.) “I’ve never played a human walrus before,” Beach says with a chuckle, “so that was some fun research.” He spent a lot of time on YouTube, watching walruses “on docks and on beaches, how they moved and how they sounded, and trying to put that together in my head.”
MAYOR OF KINGSTOWN
Beach, who plays Warden Moore, says he didn’t have much contact with star Jeremy Renner following Renner’s near-fatal snow-plow accident at the end of 2023. So he wasn’t sure how things were going to go when the Paramount+ drama returned for Season 3 — if it returned at all. “I remember when I first saw him [back on set],” Beach says, recalling that the series’ star “kept saying, ‘I’m feeling better. I’m getting stronger.’ He was happy to be there… He was a positive dude before, but he’s so positive and happy and upbeat and grateful and that kind of thing [now].”
THE PERFECT COUPLE
Now for a completely different Netflix show: a splashy drama — based on Elin Hilderbrand’s 2018 novel — about a wealthy Nantucket family whose life is upended when a body washes up on the beach during a wedding weekend. Beach plays the chief of police, who’s investigating the crime but also is “really at the behest of the people that live there, because they can fire him if they want to,” he points out. “So he has to walk a tightrope about doing his job, but also not pissing off too many of the wrong people so that he loses his job.” The stacked cast (Liev Schreiber, Eve Hewson, Meghann Fahy) also includes Nicole Kidman. “I always thought Nicole was a pretty good actress, but working with her? Working opposite her? You just go, ‘She’s pretty damn good,’” he says, chuckling at the understatement. “She really is.”
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