BEVERLY HILLS, California — Scott Foley knew he wanted to be an actor all his life. But he spent part of his teens ruining his chances.
His mother died when he was 15, and he dropped out of school and drifted. “When you lose a parent at a formative age like your teens, you’re acting out anyway, but when that happens, there’s anger and confusion,” he says in a sunlit hotel room. “I remember drinking. I got arrested once for possession of alcohol.”
But rescue arrived from an unexpected source. “One of my friends’ father and mother pulled me aside after a couple months of me drifting around, and they said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘What do you mean? I’m not going to school. I’m going to figure it out.’
“They said, ‘Don’t be an idiot. You’re going to come live with us. You’re going to go to high school, and we’ll take care of you.’ I think when these friends of mine said, ‘We’ll take care of you’ that showed me a compassion I’d never known before.”
Though they already had four children, they became Foley’s legal guardians and through them, he graduated. “I was very fortunate,” he nods.
Though he has travelled a bumpy road to be an actor, Foley is starring in one of his best roles yet. He’s portraying the real-life Green Beret surgeon, Jeffrey MacDonald, who was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and two children in Final Vision. Viewers also know Foley from his role as the naval consort on Scandal, which returns to ABC on Jan. 18, and as the hunky leading man on Felicity.
Foley was 18 when he hauled off for Los Angeles to become an actor. “Not knowing anybody, and not knowing anything about Los Angeles,” he says. He says he gradually acclimated. “You meet one person. You find one job, and they introduce you to someone else, and you say you’re an actor — and everybody’s an actor out here — and they say, ‘Well, I know an agent’ or ‘I know an acting class.’ You get in an acting class with other actors and you network.”
It sounds easy. But it took Foley six years to land a paying job as an actor. His first role was on Sweet Valley High, and he rode the bus to the audition because he didn’t have a car for several years.
“I made 230 bucks for that episode and quit my job waiting tables and thought, ‘This is it!’ Little did I know it’d be another four years before I got another acting job.”
He landed a job selling insurance and was able to walk to work. Chuckling, he says, “I didn’t know a thing about selling insurance. But those are the days that give you the character and the fortitude to really decide is this what I want to do? Because you really gotta stick it out.”
At one point he decided not to stick it out. “Christmas was coming up, and a relative I’d never met sent me a cheque for Christmas, $2,500. This was 1992 and I think I had $20 to my name. I thought, $2,500 that’s amazing! So I packed up all my stuff and bought a ticket to the Virgin Islands to St. John and was going to go live the island life. I was going to tend bar or do something but live on an island. It’s always been a dream of mine.”
He planned to camp on the beach until he found a job. But when he arrived, the campsites were full and he blew half of the $400 he had left for a hotel room for one night. He was forced to bivouac in the National Park, which was illegal. And the donkeys that had once served the now-defunct sugar plantations ate the strings to his tent, so it would no longer stand.
In desperation, he phoned his father. I said, ‘Dad, I’m homeless. I’m in St. John. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll come back to St. Louis, I’ll go to college.’ He said, ‘Are you kidding me? You’re not coming home, go back to L.A. I’ll buy you a ticket.’ So I went back to L.A. And it’s the best thing he ever did for me. That’s the only time I wanted to quit.”
Foley has been married to his second wife, actress Marika Dominczyk (his first wife was actress Jennifer Garner) for 10 years.
