139 - I've Played One on TV: Phil Reeves

Our guest today is Phil Reeves; Phil has been an actor in Los Angeles for decades but he has also been a police officer and is now a law enforcement chaplain and a vocal advocate for first responder chaplaincy.  This first part, I'm just going to introduce you to Phil and let him tell you how he went from Hollywood movie sets to law enforcement.  In part two, we'll talk about the hard parts of the job and what led him to becoming an advocate nationally for chaplaincy.

Music is by Wes Hutchinson

Hey Chaplain Podcast Episode 139

Tags:

Police, 9-11, Acting, Age, Career, Casting, Movies, Relationships, TV, Hollywood, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, California, Louisiana, New York

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is Vinny Montez hanging out with Hey Chaplin. We love this podcast, and if you're not listening to it, you absolutely should. We love you, we appreciate you, and keep doing what you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Welcome to Hey Chaplin. My name is Jared Altic, and I'm a chaplain with the police department. The Hey Chaplin podcast is about talking to police officers who say, Hey Chaplin, I've got a story to tell and some hard-earned wisdom to share. The guests on Hey Chaplin come from across the world, from the LAPD to Scotland Yard. They are sharing their wisdom so that you don't have to learn the hard way. And as Patrol Chaplain, I think that you deserve something positive and encouraging. The growth of this show depends on word of mouth. If you're a regular listener, would you take a moment and copy the link to this show and send it to a cop who might like to, or maybe even need to, here's something positive and helpful. You guys are the reason we have listeners in all 50 states and almost 150 countries. But I routinely run into cops even in my hometown of Kansas City who have never heard of Hey Chaplin. Anything you do to spread the word is worth its weight in gold. And I deeply appreciate it. So a few months ago, I went home, fixed dinner, and turned on the TV. And I looked down at my food, moving the morsels around in the bowl. And when I looked back at the TV, I froze. That's Phil. The actor on the screen is Phil! My new chaplain friend from California! I mean I knew he was an actor, but that's him! Right there! And I was just talking to him an hour ago on FaceTime! He looks exactly the same! Now I've got to pause the show, put my food down, and check IMDB. How many times have I seen this guy and not realized he would be someone that I would get to know really well? Our guest today is Bill Reeves. Bill has been an actor in Los Angeles for decades, but he has also been a police officer and is now a law enforcement chaplain and a vocal advocate for first responder chaplaincy. In this first part, I'm just going to introduce you to Phil and let him tell you how he went from Hollywood movie sets to patrolling the streets for law enforcement. In part two, we'll talk about the hard parts of the job and what led him to becoming an advocate nationally for Chaplaincy. Here's Phil Reeves. Hello, Phil. How are you today? Jared, my brother, I am well. Thank you. How are you, sir? I'm doing well. At the time we're recording this, we had just spent uh part of a week together in New Orleans at a conference. We did, yes. Appreciated you being my travel buddy.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Thank you. Same, same.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

We were battle buddies for sure. That's right. We did a presentation together. We sat for hours in the airport together. Uh, and we went and we wandered into New Orleans and ate at Mother's Restaurant. That was yes, we did. Yeah, yes, we did.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

And there I identified myself as your plus one.

unknown 3:30

Right.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Well, I've I've really enjoyed traveling with you. And I also have enjoyed uh looking back through your IMDB filmography and realizing I have seen you dozens of times and didn't realize that this was a person that I would get to know eventually.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

That's funny.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

How did you how did you get started in acting?

SPEAKER_00 3:57

So I started, I graduated from college in 1974. Uh, I was totally in love with a girl a year older than me who was an actress, and I was not an actor at all at that time. So she got a job in New York in a regional theater. I followed her out there. Uh, but by the time I got out there, she'd moved on from me. I went to a Christmas party at the theater that she was uh working at, and um the director of an upcoming play that was going to be put up on the stage in January got way too drunk and hired me. And so uh that's how I ended up getting my my uh equity card. Um did stage for years and years, ended up doing a Broadway tour of a play called Children of a Lesser God back in the early 80s.

SPEAKER_01 4:52

Did you have hopes of did you have hopes of being cast on that movie?

SPEAKER_00 4:57

Uh I don't have hopes of being cast in anything. I mean, I'll I'll take it as it comes, you know. No, I knew that uh, you know, that when they cast the movie, they were gonna look for big names for sure. I I get that box office appeal and the rest of that stuff. So uh yeah, so I uh jumped ship in '82, came out to LA just because you know New York scared the heck out of me. It's such a dense city and very expensive. Uh LA was more like a, yeah, my family would have been most recently from Las Cruces. Uh they'd moved from Las Cruces, New Mexico from Chicago back in the in the late 60s. So I kind of knew the southwestern vibe, southwestern town. LA at least had some open space and some trees and some mountains. So I ended up in LA. Uh, and that's how I got into film and television.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

So you were working fairly regularly. You had um, you know, a lot of appearances, kind of a one or two-time kind of guest appearance and in a lot of shows. And I was looking back through and through, you know, up and through the 90s and even into the early 2000s, you were you were getting regular, regular work. What do you attribute that to?

SPEAKER_00 6:10

A couple things. I'm really good with exposition. Exposition is when you're in in a script, it's all the stuff that that just tells the story that people haven't seen. But it putting the narration into the dialogue. Exactly. Putting narration, I'm good at that. I have a very short-term memory. Now, if you ask me two seconds after I walk off the set what I had just said, I could not possibly tell you. It's gone. Uh, that's the other thing is uh, and I would say that I I could hit my marks, you know, I had my lines prepared. And the other thing is, and I tell this young actors all the time coming out here, be nice to everybody. Be kind to everybody. Because that, you know, girl sitting behind the desk at the casting office, she might be running a studio in five, 10, 15 years. Sure. Not so it's not just a mercenary thing that, you know, you hopeful that you know that will redound to your benefit, but but just, you know, and I think people just general a lot of directors I get called back to work with people over and over. I I'm just the kind of guy I guess people feel comfortable going to have a beer with, basically.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Do you have people that you have routinely worked with that you've had opportunities to work with on multiple projects like that? Anyone whose name we might recognize?

SPEAKER_00 7:29

Yes. Um, yeah, I mean, one guy I've worked with a lot and really enjoyed working with is a director named Alexander Payne. I first worked with him, I think back in the late 90s, on a movie called um Election of Reese Witherspoon and uh Matthew Broderick. And then he did um About Schmidt and Sideways. Sideways is a film about uh California wine country. He just likes working with people he's worked with before. Uh-huh. Uh he cast a lot of people in his uh movies out of Omaha, people that he'd gone to school with, or you know, like his barber or his banker, and he would fly them to all these locations. And you got on his good list. I guess I did. Yeah, I guess I did. He's a super nice guy. You can usually tell when you walk onto a set, you know, the the atmosphere uh trickles from the top down. So if you have a director and producers that are, you know, chill, mellow, good people, usually the process is way easier and very chill and mellow. But if you have people that are yellers and screamers, um, not so much fun. But the Alexander Payne is the opposite of all of that. I've worked with uh Nick Offerman, I've worked with uh Oswald uh Pat and Oswald, I worked for years on a show called VEP on HBO with um Julia Luis Dreyfus from Seinfeld, Jack Nicholson, uh Leonardo DiCaprio, just a whole bunch of folks.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you get enough work that you didn't have to do a day job, or did you always keep a day job going?

SPEAKER_00 9:17

Like in the 80s and 90s. Yeah, so I was very fortunate that I didn't have to do that. I worked steadily. My income was not predictable. It was like a, you know, I once showed my uh I did a chart of my annual income over the years and I showed it to my brother-in-law, and he said, This is making me motion sick. Because it would way up one year and way down next year. Um, but both my wife and I are very frugal people, you know, like the ant and the grasshopper. We saved when times were thin, and we just kind of, you know, um stumbled through. Sure. Um very blessed, very fortunate that way, you know, when when we needed the work, work came along. And so, you know, I just kind of stitched it together.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Yeah. So tell me about uh 9-11 and what your reaction was to uh the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

So 9-11 turned out to be our son's first day of kindergarten. And you know, this story is not special at all for all of us that went through that day, you know, but everybody's story is unique. Uh and a neighbor called called me and said, Hey, you've got to turn on the TV. This is this is crazy. And like everybody else, you know, I was just absolutely stunned and rocked and astonished and and grieving. And I remember seeing a photograph, it was an iconic photograph of this man and woman jumping off the top of one of the towers, and they were holding hands. And I heard anecdotally that they did not know each other prior, they were just two strangers sharing this final moment together. And there's something inside of me, it was almost like survivor guilt. It was like, there, but for the grace of God, go ahead. And the other reaction I had was, oh hell no. No, this shall not stand. No way, this shall not stand. I was 48 at the time, wanted in the fight in the worst way, called all the armed services recruiters, Marines, Navy, Air Force, Army, and they're like, How old are you?

SPEAKER_01 11:40

They weren't they weren't desperate enough to start taking 48-year-olds. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Of course, when I told them my age, the next thing they said was, Well, try the Coast Guard. All of our coasties will appreciate that. Yeah.

unknown 11:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

So, but even the Coast Guard said, You're too old, man. So shortly thereafter, I remember reading in uh I lived in a uh a suburb of LA at the time, Burbank, California. And I remember reading in this local paper that a lot of these uh Burbank coppers were getting called up. They were in the Armed Forces Reserve and they were called up to active duty. So they were looking for coppers. So I I contacted them and said, Hey, you know, cops are in the fight, firefighters in the fight. Could I get involved with this? And the crusty old detective that did the hiring or the initial screening, of course, said, I think you're too old to do this. And I said, Look, man, they had a PT test coming up the next Saturday, you know, the initial um physical test. And you had to get through this. Yeah, it was up at our shooting range, and you had to run through the range, and they had a shooting house, you had to run through the house, and you had to finish this obstacle course, you know, a dummy drag and all this stuff in a certain amount of time. So I said, if I can do that, can we talk about the next step? He said, All right, you can come and try that. So back in those days, I ran a lot, so my legs were good, but if I did one pull-up, it was a big day for me. I had no upper body strength. So I I ran the PT course and I failed it by about two seconds. And I said, Hey man, there are another group coming in. I said, Detective, can I try this again? He goes, Well, we don't know that. Could I just try it one more time? So I did it and I beat it by about a second. The second time. Oh wow. Wow. So the next conversation we had was uh he basically said, Look, if you get through backgrounds, we'll put you through the academy. Uh and if you survive the academy, then we'll take the next step. So that's what I did. They put me through the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Academy. You know, everybody in that class was could have been my kid, yeah. Um, you know, less than half my age, made it through just fine. So then went to uh Burbank picked me up as a reserve officer. Uh in California, and a lot of states have this, you can become a res you have full arrest powers, you're out on patrol, uh, but uh they you pay you're basically a volunteer. They pay you a dollar a year for workman's comp and and and that's what you do. So um did that for a couple of years, gave them thousands of hours of time because I I loved it, you know, and I don't want to learn about it as much as I could. So that was kind of my entree into policing after 9-11.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

But you're still working at this time. You probably couldn't work while you're in the academy, but but you're still a working actor. You're you're you're I I can look down through your filmography and you're you're you're producing in 2001, 2002, 2003. I mean, you're you've got lots of work in there. And so so, how do you juggle between getting called for auditions and and having to be on set versus giving time as reserve officer?

SPEAKER_00 14:58

Yeah, good question. Looking back, I don't know how I did it. No, uh I I would say, first of all, during the academy, you're right. And and my agents were super supportive of this whole process, they were just fantastic about it. Uh things came up, they were just great with me about it. They weren't giving you grief, wanting you to quit. Right. No, no, they they hung in there with me, you know. Um and as a reserve, if stuff came up, I could step aside because basically, you know, it was a volunteer type position. Sure. Uh then in um 2004, I lateraled to another agency as a reserve. But after I arrived there within a month or two, they lost one of their full timers and they asked me to come aboard as a full-time officer there. And I said, Look, I've got this other life. Love to do it, I love the work, but you know, if I can create my own shift, I'll do it. Yeah. And I said, I would like to work nights on weekends. So we worked 12 and a half hour shifts. Uh, I worked Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night. You know, every week we ended up owing two and a half hours to the city that we would pay back once a month the extra 10 hours. Uh-huh. Um, and so that's what I did. I ended up working nights, weekends, and that allowed me to have my weekdays free to um, you know, do my film and television stuff.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

And then this is in a smaller agency, right? I mean, that's probably a very doable arrangement. I mean, a lot of times the new guy has to take nights and weekends anyway. And so, and so if you're volunteering, like I'll take those. That's probably, I mean, that probably that probably helped this probably help that negotiation, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:45

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. They're like, oh, all right, this guy's dumber than he looks, you know. Uh, sure, let's do this, you know. And the other thing about it is, as you said, it was a small agency. And uh, when I went there, uh coming from my film and television background, people were just really enamored with it. Uh, loved the fact that I was doing that. Uh, as I mentioned to you, I think in New Orleans, sometimes what I would do is uh I when I was working on a film and TV project, I'd take guys with me, they'd sit in the in the video village and watch me work while I was doing stuff or watch other people. And they just love that. So everybody was totally on my side, very cool. If I had like two weeks out of town on some project, they'd jump in there and say, Hey, I'll cover your shift. Yeah, you got it, man. Go do it. You know, love that. Who are you working with? Yeah, what is Reese Witherspoon really like?

SPEAKER_01 17:38

You know, all that kind of stuff. Your co-workers knew you were doing this, and so they might have seen some of the stuff you're in as it's coming out. You know, I don't know what the time difference would be. You know, months later, perhaps they're this they see it come out. But but did you ever get recognized in uniform as an actor?

SPEAKER_00 17:59

One time that I can think of, I was working on a show called Girlfriends. It's funny you mention this. We had this very remote, you know, warehouse district that a lot of nefarious stuff would happen on. So we're gonna so I'd go down there, you know, two in the morning, three in the morning. Great time to catch bad actors doing bad things. Down the street, and I see a car parked, there's two big guys in there. And uh I go up and contact them and roll the window down, and of course the driver is like tatted up to the gills, right? Face tattoos, the whole thing. And I ask him for his ID, and he's he's just his he's staring at me like he's drilling holes through through me, you know, with his with his stare. And I'm thinking, oh, here we go. You know, I'm out here by myself. I'd already rolled somebody for a backup. But you know, it's three in the morning and it's dark and it's isolated, and you know, nobody's gonna hear me scream, right? And uh just as he's handing me ID, he looks at me and he goes, I've seen you on TV. And I was like, What? You're in girlfriends. Now, why this guy liked girlfriends? Who knows? Who knows? That's funny. Most of the time, no, because you know, you put on a uniform and people tend not to recognize you, you know, may know you as a civilian, but they won't recognize you in uniform and vice versa.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Yeah, yeah. No, they their eyes are drawn to the badge and the gun and the uniform itself, and not necessarily your face or your voice, perhaps. But uh, but did you get a chance out since you were working as a police officer, did you get a chance to play a police officer on screen?

SPEAKER_00 19:48

Well, as a matter of fact, no. I don't have a look that is compatible with police officer, I guess. Uh, I get cast a lot as you know, white-collar guys, like lawyers, bankers, teachers, priests, pastors, all that kind of stuff. But I could not get arrested as a cop.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

Uh couldn't get couldn't get cast as a street cop.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

Could not get cast as a street cop.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Maybe the commissioner, maybe the commissioner, but not the street cop, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:21

Yeah, commissioner, yeah, exactly. Somebody in a suit and tie. Yeah, that's fine. One quick story. Back in the day, they were uh casting Breaking Bad out of uh Sony Studios down in West LA. And they were looking for cops. And those of you that watched the show, you may remember there's a scene, it was a like a DV scene, domestic violence call. The cops come in and talk to uh Walter White, his wife, and they go away. Well, those were the cops in uniform. And casting said, We want real cops. We want to cast a real cop for this. So I told my sergeant about this, and he's like, dude, that is so great. Awesome. Jump in the black and white, go down there and audition in your uniform. I'm like, really? He said, Yeah, go get it, get it. So I drive down there in my black and white, you know, the gate's open for you. Oh you know, when you get there, hop out in uniform, go in, do the reading, never heard from them again. Never heard from them again.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

They were looking for something more authentic.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Now, if I had a suit, the guy was a detective, maybe, but in uniform, not so much.

SPEAKER_01 21:36

Right, that's hilarious. I want to thank Phil for being on the show, and funny enough, I think he looks like a retired cop. If I just met him randomly on the street, it would be maybe my first guess. But subconsciously, I have seen him play doctors and lawyers and judges and all kinds of other professions as well. So maybe that's just a Testament to his great acting ability. In part two, we're going to look at more of Phil's law enforcement career, including some of the negative side. And we're going to talk about how he left law enforcement and went into chaplaincy. Here's a clip from part two, next time on Hey Chaplin.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

And my admin basically wanted this guy gone. Uh, and I was just not willing to uh to do that. You know, it was he was a young guy, he had a great career ahead of him, he had a wife and kids, you know, pension and insurance, and I was not willing to throw him under the bus. And I just actually took some some training a couple months ago with FBI Lita with a couple of great chiefs who were teaching this class, and they both talked about, you know, when you start getting into administrative, when you start promoting up, one of the things you probably need to think about before you do is what hills you might be willing to die on. Yeah. You can bend, but you know, uh to some extent, but where what's the moral rubicon for you?

SPEAKER_01 23:20

The views expressed here are the personal views of the host and our guest, and do not necessarily represent the views of any law enforcement agency or its components. If you like this episode, please share it with a cop or someone who loves a cop. Thank you for listening to Hey Chaplin. And as always, let's pray for peace in our city.