Poker Faces in the Crowd: J. Patrick McNamara

In the late 1970s, J. Patrick McNamara was on location in Caesarea, Israel, to shoot The Fury, a film starring Kirk Douglas. Already a veteran stage actor, McNamara was quickly becoming a respected movie actor as well, and Douglas had asked him for help with a vocal problem he’d been having. McNamara gladly agreed. On a late afternoon, as the sun sank into the Mediterranean Sea, the pair walked three miles down an ancient cobblestone road filled with ruined Roman columns and Caesarean sculptures. Their conversation remains one of McNamara’s fondest memories from a long, prolific acting career.

After living in New York, Europe, and Los Angeles, McNamara eventually moved home to New Orleans, where he recently retired and returned to an early passion for poker. “I realized that the game had passed me by and I needed to learn some of the new stuff,” he told me over email, “so I’ve been reading Matthew Janda’s No Limit Hold ’em For Advanced Players #OldDogNewTricks.” We met last month at Harrah’s New Orleans and discussed how he got into acting, Off-Off-Broadway, working with Steven Spielberg, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and how acting has improved his poker game.

Ben Saxton: I’d love to hear about your experience with acting, and how you got started.

Pat McNamara: I went from one major to another in undergraduate school, and never felt like I was settled into anything. I decided to do a play for public speaking purposes, because I knew that I was going to be a lawyer. I did a play, I was good at it, and that was that. Then I went to law school and hated it.

Was this in Nola?

Yes, at Tulane. Law school was obviously not for me. I went to New York, got a job at Flying Tiger airlines, and started going to the theater two or three nights a week. Back then, when you can’t afford to see everything that you want to see, there was an option called second acting. At the first intermission you mix with the crowd and, when they go back inside, you look for an empty seat and watch the play from the second act on. I would often see performances and say to myself, I could do that. With some training — I could do that. Then I saw [Richard] Burton do Hamlet, and Jason Robards do After the Fall, and I said, I don’t know if I can do that.

Did their performances motivate you?

Oh, yeah. When I came back to The University of New Orleans, I became a theater major and immediately got the lead in all the shows.

What was your initial attraction to theater? Did you grow up reading Shakespeare?

No. I didn’t come from a household that had much of a cultural background. We didn’t have any music more advanced than Fats Domino. We weren’t poor, but there was no art in our house. But as soon as I got into Shakespeare, I really took to him, and indeed I followed him throughout my career. As soon as I got into the program at UNO I did Macbeth. Later on I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and did five Shakespeares there. I did Shakespeare at Tulane, much later, when I moved back here.

Anyway, I left UNO and worked with two mentors of mine at Wayne State University in Detroit. When I felt ready I went to New York, did a few auditions, and studied with one of the great voice teaching masters, Arthur Lessac, who got me a job teaching voice at the National Academy of Drama in Carnegie Hall. So I was teaching and looking to do regular theater, but I became exposed to the Off-Off Broadway that was exploding at that time, in 1967. Playwrights were doing radically different things. It blew my mind.

Was it the experimental structures that appealed to you? The subject matter?

Everything. I never imagined that theater could be so visceral, so meaningful, so immediate. It hit you in the gut. And so, for three years, I was with an experimental theater company called La MaMa Plexus. It was a really difficult, physical form of theater. We were known as the Green Bay Packers of La MaMa. We did workshops three hours a day, four days a week — we did tumbling, things like that. Tumbling is great when you’re seven years old, but if you’re 26 or 27, then you bust your ass. There was a kind of physicality that required great potential for movement. When you saw these people on the stage, even if they were relaxed, you had a feeling that at any moment they might be on the other end of the stage. And indeed sometimes they were. It was a fashionable method of acting that came from Poland — the Grotowski technique — and we were the best American practitioners at that time. We worked our asses off.

After that, I got a gig teaching drama at Antioch College, and then at a new American university in Switzerland, where I was the head of the theater department. It was a glorious time, and I went from there to Amsterdam, back to New York, and then, because I knew that I wanted to have my own theater, to New Orleans. I bought a long-term lease on the Prytania Theater, added a stage and dressing rooms, and ran a theater company from 1974–77. We lost a whole lot of money.

I would imagine that theater is a hard business.

It is. During all that time, I had no interest in movie acting. I was a stage actor. But there were a few films that came to be shot in New Orleans, and they tried to cast local actors, so I started doing film work. I didn’t mind film work at all, and it paid really well. Really well. So I joined the Screen Actors Guild, and all of a sudden I had a film resume. I had a baby due, I realized I couldn’t throw this party anymore of supporting the local theater, I needed to go somewhere, and the last casting I did in New Orleans was Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I was on set for weeks and weeks and weeks, in Mobile, Alabama.

What was it like working with Steven Spielberg?

I had worked with Brian De Palma, and that was great. But it was life-changing to work with Close Encounters, for a few reasons. First, I was there for a really long time. And everyone on that picture — everyone, down to the first assistant — knew that this picture might be great. So everybody was really trying to get it right, which doesn’t happen very often. Spielberg himself was under tremendous pressure, because Columbia Pictures was going to be bankrupt if that film failed. Their stock was down to about six dollars a share. The movie was way overscheduled and way over budget, and so the studio executives were leaning on the producers, leaning on the cinematographers, and leaning on Spielberg.

But he got it done.

I remember one sequence in the film. The mothership goes by, it’s blasting music, the scientists are watching up above from a pod, and Steven said, “I need the glass to burst from the sound.” The studio said, “Absolutely not. That’s not in the script. It’s not in the budget, and it’ll cost $1,500.” He said, “I have to have it.” They said no. He told them, “Break the fucking thing. I’ll pay for it.” You watch that moment. It had to be there.

There’s no way we’ll be able to discuss your whole filmography. You’ve appeared in Phantasm II, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and The A-Team, just to name a few. Do any films jump out as a favorite?

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure was fun.

It’s such a fun movie. Is that what made it fun?

Yeah.

I noticed that Bill & Ted 3 is coming out. Are you open to doing it if they want you?

I’m retired.

Could you come out of retirement?

They’d have to wave the checkbook at me, I guess, but that’s not gonna happen.

When did you officially retire?

I retired from the stage about four years ago, and from the screen two years ago.

Do you miss it?

No. I thought I would, but I don’t at all. I love acting. Acting on stage doesn’t pay anything. It’s really hard work. Acting on screen I loved doing, but I hate the process of auditions.

When you retired, is that when poker came onto your radar? Or have you been playing all your life?

I started playing poker in high school with my buddies. In college, I played in bar room games. I played a lot of seven-card stud in the early sixties, and I played it pretty damn well. Then I pretty much quit. Certainly by the time I went to Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles, I didn’t play. The only California games were in Gardena, and they only played jacks or better and lowball. If you play five hands an hour, you’re playing too loose. I went there a couple times, and it was fucking dreadful. Somebody, it might have been Gay Talese, wrote a line that I’ll never forget: “Nobody ever goes to Gardena. They end up there.”

When did you circle back around to poker?

I started playing again in the late eighties. I went out to Las Vegas a few times and played in a $1,500 limit hold ’em event. There were 580 players, which was the most entries they’d ever had in a tournament. It was really cool, because I looked around the room at all those people and said, I’ve read your book. I’ve read your book. I’ve read your book. I also had the thrill of knocking Amarillo Slim out of the tournament.

Do you have any favorite poker books?

The one that I cut my teeth on when I was a seven-card stud player — I don’t even know it’s any good anymore — is Herbert Yardley’s The Education of a Poker Player. He was a World War Two codebreaker. I also read Brunson’s Super System, Cloutier and McEvoy’s Championship No Limit and Pot Limit Hold ’em, and Sklansky and Malmuth’s Hold ’em Poker for Advanced Players.

Has your acting background helped your poker game?

Yeah, a little bit. Not so much that I act when I’m playing, but I think it helps me in reading other people. Bad players are terrible actors. They say that the camera, in closeup, can spot a lie. Any flicker of falsehood shows up. And so you learn to spot the littlest lie.

The flip-side is poker player who become actors, as we were in our little poker film. What was that experience like for you, working with beginners? Is that fun for you?

Well, it was a lark.

It was fun for all of us.

Good.

*Originally published in the April 2019 issue of Two Plus Two Magazine