Featured Testimonial About Creighton University
It was an interesting acting challenge.
Note: Actor and Creighton alumnus Bryan McClure, a member of the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, spoke with us on Wednesday, July 12, before SAG-AFTRA went on strike due to an ongoing labor dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
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By Micah Mertes
OK, this article's headline isn’t quite accurate. Bryan McClure, BA’06, does still have a head in the movie. It’s just not located on his shoulders.
McClure plays the Headless Knight in the new Disney adaptation of the beloved theme park attraction Haunted Mansion (in theaters July 28), and the role was, well, complicated.
In McClure's scenes — in which he worked alongside such movie stars as Danny DeVito, Owen Wilson, Tiffany Haddish, Jamie Lee Curtis and LaKeith Stanfield — he wore a suit of armor and carried his knight's helmet. That’s where his digitally severed head would eventually live thanks to the work of Disney's effects artists.
“I was working closely with the special effects supervisor who, in post-production, would basically be cutting my head off my shoulders and superimposing it into the knight’s helmet,” McClure says. “It was an interesting acting challenge.”
For instance, whenever McClure turned his head in a scene, he would have to turn the helmet the same way. When he was working with other actors, he would have to look up above them in order to capture the proper sightline of his soon-to-be-severed head's new vantage point.
These past few years, McClure has been gradually working his way up toward bigger roles in higher-profile projects. More recently, he starred in the TV series Atlanta, The Walking Dead, The Summer I Turned Pretty and Class of ’09, among others. He also scored the lead in the romantic comedy In Other Words. The Haunted Mansion — a summer blockbuster budgeted at $157.8 million — is a breakthrough role for someone who’s been at this for well over a decade.
McClure, a Council Bluffs native, first got the acting bug when he was a Creighton student. And not from a college theater production but a gig in a local commercial.
McClure had just returned from a Creighton Study Abroad trip and needed a summer job. He replied to an ad for an Omaha acting agency and was shortly after cast in a commercial for Windstream Communications.
“I was in the commercial for all of half a second,” McClure says. “But I still loved the experience and the creative energy of the set and all the artists working together to create something.”
In 2009, he made the leap and headed west to Hollywood to try his hand at acting. McClure knew it was a tough business, but he had a backup plan. He would continue to work in the field of his Creighton degree (graphic design) while trying to book auditions. (In fact, McClure has never stopped working as a graphic designer. He now owns his own business, Momentum Creative Studios.)
McClure booked his first role in a TV show — CBS’s Hawaii Five-0 reboot — in 2011. Things were going well enough in LA, but another city beckoned.
“I felt God calling me to move to Atlanta,” McClure says. “I fit everything I could fit into my car and drove there.”
This was in 2015. By that time, Georgia tax incentives had rapidly turned the city into one the main hubs for American TV and film production, bringing billions of dollars in economic impact to the state every year. With a growing number of productions (and less competition compared to New York and LA), Atlanta was the place to be for an up-and-coming actor like McClure.
The move led to roles in major Atlanta-filmed projects, like The Walking Dead and, of course, Atlanta. And now Haunted Mansion.
When we spoke with McClure, he was about to hit the road to LA for Haunted Mansion’s July 15 red-carpet premiere. Then SAG-AFTRA went on strike, making it the first major studio premiere to be impacted by the strike. Though the premiere went forward, SAG members, including McClure, didn’t attend (as the terms of the strike bar members from promoting new films and TV series).
While the actors are striking, McClure will continue to make ends meet through his graphic design job.
“I’m really grateful to have this as a complimentary career that’s been instrumental to me being able to pursue my dream of being an actor,” McClure says. “I’m thankful for my education itself. I loved my Creighton experience.
“I was involved in a lot of different things at Creighton, and I met many wonderful people. Also — and I don’t know if I appreciated this at the time — the liberal arts requirements we had led to me being more well-rounded than I might have been.”
McClure was particularly taken with the philosophical and spiritual side of his Jesuit education.
“Having this background helps me figure out answers to questions I encounter every day,” he says. “Like … How is this filtered through faith? How is this related to God? These things are incredibly important backbones to whatever field we might find ourselves in. I look back now, and I see how God’s orchestration played out in ways I couldn’t have even imagined.”
Creighton, he says, helped him see that more clearly. It offered an education that, you might say, put a good head on his shoulders.
Haunted Mansion is in theaters everywhere July 28.
