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Peja's Wonderful World of Makebelieve Import
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Published:
2020-11-05
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700
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1/1
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13
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830

Doctor No More

Summary:

Interview

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

DOCTOR NO MORE
By
Mark Nollinger

He's a physician in real life, but Johnathan LaPaglia's prescription for success calls for a healthy dose of fantasy and Seven Days of pure escapism.

A doctor by training, Johnathan LaPaglia is finding out this afternoon that playing a patient can be a real pain.

LaPaglia, the ER physician-turned-actor who stars as time-traveling government agent Frank Parker on the UPN sci-fi/action series Seven Days (Wednesdays, 8 PM/ET), is flat on his back on a Vancouver soundstage, sensors taped to his chest, sliding in and out of a large tube resembling an iron lung. An experimental treatment on his alter ego has gone awry, leaving the actor covered in fake blood, groaning and coughing his brains out for take after take as cast and crew struggle to get the sequence right. The work is tedious, messy and frustrating. Can it possibly be anything like what LaPaglia imagined when he decided to ditch medicine to follow the lead of his big brother Anthony (Murder One) and study acting?

"No, no," says LaPaglia, 31, later in a hotel bar, smiling over a midnight glass of merlot after another 13-hour day on the set. "Often I'm lying in some contraption like that and thinking, 'What happened? I used to save lives for a living.' It's so silly."

Not that he's complaining. This afternoon's tedium notwithstanding, LaPaglia's decision to trade in his stethoscope for a SAG card has mostly been a raging success. Barely four years into his second career, the ruggedly handsome Austrailian has been a regular on another network TV series (New York Undercover), starred in an acclaimed off-Broadway play ("The Resistable Rise Of Arturo Ui") and worked with Woody Allen ("Deconstructing Harry"). And LaPaglia's portrayal of the cocky rogue Parker helped make Seven Days UPN's second-highest-rated drama last season, behind Star Trek: Voyager.

"When I was studying, I didn't think I would ever end up working as an actor," says LaPaglia. "I had a passion, but that's as far as it got. I've been very lucky." That down-to-earth sensibility is a key to his appeal. "He's extremely bright, but he's very humble," says Seven Days costar Justina Vail (Olga Vulkavitch).

LaPaglia was born and raised in Adelaide, Austrailia, where his father, Eddie, owned an auto dealership and his mother, Maria, worked as a secretary. He pursued fine arts in high school, but self-doubt about his talent at painting and sculpting led him to study medicine at the University of Adelaide. By the time he graduated and went to work, he was questioning his choice. "I felt repressed," LaPaglia says of his three years as an ER physician in Adelaide, Sydney and London. "I had all this creative energy and I felt I couldn't use any of it."

With Anthony's encouragement, LaPaglia began taking acting classes at night, after his hospital shifts. In 1994 he quit his job and moved to New York City. Adjusting to a new city with no friends, no work and little money wasn't easy. "I had a lot of sleepless nights thinking, 'My God, what have I done?,' he recalls. LaPaglia got his big break in 1996, when he was cast as Detective Tom McNamara for the last season of the hip-hop cop series New York Undercover. He had just finished acting school and was back in London working as a doctor to earn enough money to return to the staes when he got the call. "That was the last time I practiced medicine," he says.

There are times when he misses his old job, he admits. "It's only now that I've taken such a big step back from it that I realize you can be creative in medicine," says LaPaglia, who lives with actress Ursula Brooks ("Sugar Town"). I would eventually like to see myself combining my two professions," the actor-doctor continues, suggesting that he might work half the year at each.

If he could really go back in time, would he do things differently? "I definately believe in fate," LaPaglia says, "so I don't think I'd want to change a thing. That's a bad thing for an actor who plays a time traveller to say, isn't it?"

=30=

Notes:

This orphaned work was originally on Pejas WWOMB posted by author M.
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