The new FX drama (Tuesday, 10 p.m. ET/PT) melds McCallany's love of acting and boxing. He plays an aging former boxer struggling to support his family while privately battling pugilistic dementia.
"I'm just passionate about boxing," says McCallany, 46. "Boxing has been my favorite sport since I was a boy. My younger brother was a Golden Gloves champion boxer, and I grew up boxing with him."
Though McCallany has stepped into the boxing/acting ring previously — he played Mike Tyson's boxing trainer, Teddy Atlas, in the HBO film Tyson, and he boxed in the Meg Ryan movie Against the Ropes— it is his most prominent role yet. Unlike his younger brother, Michael, now deceased, McCallany never considered boxing professionally. He says acting has always been his "calling."
But McCallany's parents (Tony Award-winning actor/producer Michael McAloney and Broadway actress Julie Wilson) didn't want him to be a child actor.
"I kept pressuring them to get me an agent," says McCallany, who remembers watching child actors on TV in movies and thinking, "Why can't I do that?" But "my parents wanted me to have a 'normal childhood.' "
Eventually, the lure of Hollywood proved irresistible, and McCallany, then living with his maternal grandparents in Nebraska after his parents were divorced, ran away to Los Angeles at age 14.
"I've often felt the greatest gift that a young person can have is the certainty of knowing who they want to be," he says.
And after what he describes as "25 years of small roles ... little shows that nobody came to see ... and small parts in movies where sometimes I only had one scene or one line, where I was wondering how I was going to pay the bills," McCallany hopes his new role will "widen his audience."
His lengthy résumé includes a stint on CSI: Miami and films such as Men of Honor, Three Kings and Fight Club, but he's ready to step back into the spotlight. "When success comes a little bit later in life, it's sweeter in a way, because you really feel like you earned it, you paid your dues."
McCallany, who was up against "more famous actors" for the part of Patrick "Lights" Leary, says his experience sealed the deal.
"If you try to take an actor in his 40s who has never boxed and try and make him look like the heavyweight champion of the world, it's very hard to do," he says. "It requires a certain kind of movement and a certain kind of fluidity. The fact that I had a boxing background really worked in my favor."
Though the series is set in the boxing world, it really is "a family drama" that focuses on his character's relationship with his wife, his daughters and his brother, McCallany says.
"I could watch boxing all day long, but not everyone in the audience shares my unbridled enthusiasm," he says with a laugh. "For 'Lights' Leary, family is the most important thing in the world. That's why he could let go of boxing."
For now, Lights Out is McCallany's most important thing in the world.
"I never really anticipated that all these long hours at the gym would pay off — that I would get to play the heavyweight champion of the world on my own television show," he says. "I was just there (at the gym) because I loved it. And then the universe rewarded me."
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