From Sandlots to Mean Streets

Trenton-area native Tom Guiry gets down and dirty in The Black Donnellys

By Jeff Bell

Philly EDGE Correspondent

In his 26 years, Tom Guiry has been torpedoed by Nazis, pinned down by Somali militiamen and grilled for the murder of Sean Penn’s daughter.

By rights, those edgy roles in the films U-571, Black Hawk Down and Mystic River respectively should have coated the Trenton-area native in grit and grime.

Instead, it’s sand that clings to Guiry.

Such is the burden of the guy who played Scotty Smalls in the beloved 1993 baseball flick The Sandlot.

“Not too long ago [when] I was in a mall, I see this kid looking at me—he must have been 9 or 10,” Guiry recalls.

“And he goes, ‘Mom, that’s Smalls!’ and the mom goes, ‘Oh, don’t be silly!’ She couldn’t believe it. Then her husband came in—he was so shocked.

“It made me feel good, but it was kind of strange to think that this movie I did 15 years ago made such an impact on people.”

Credit that youngster with keen powers of observation. These days, Guiry’s a far cry from the impish 11-year-old who starred in that wholesome kid-pleaser. Fuller of face, stockier of build and sprouting patches of reddish-brown stubble, he now has the mien of a young character actor who wouldn’t look out of place in a posse of working-class bar crawlers.

If anything can complete Guiry’s transition to adult thespian in the minds of those few holdouts, it’s his latest role.

In NBC’s The Black Donnellys [debuting Feb. 26 at 10 p.m.], he plays Jimmy Donnelly, a petty thief, heroin addict and likely alcoholic who drags his three Black Irish brothers into the New York City underworld.

Created and written by Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco—the team behind the Oscar-winning film Crash—and loosely based on Moresco’s childhood, the series dissects a tricky, twisty family dynamic with unexpected flourishes of humor, using small-time crime as a backdrop.

In other words, don’t expect a network clone of The Sopranos with a substituted ethnicity.

“Crime is definitely prevalent in the show,” says Guiry. “But as the episodes go on, it gets overshadowed by the story of the brothers and the whole family. That’s pretty much the heart and core.”

Still, when it came time to shoot his character’s encounters with sordid undesirables, he was able to draw upon firsthand experience.

Growing up “100 percent Irish” in Hamilton, N.J.—where he’s made his home since moving from the Bronx at age 8—Guiry says he knew his fair share of bad seeds.

“I wasn’t really close with them, but a whole bunch of guys…[were] doing things they probably will regret for the rest of their lives,” Guiry says as he lets loose an easy, goofy laugh.

“There’s a couple of guys I thought about a lot when I was doing the pilot.”

His own childhood—nurtured by a Manhattan phone company worker and an ER nurse—was of a more straight-and-narrow variety.

The youngest of three kids, Guiry fell into acting while still in the Bronx, when he was enrolled in special classes to break him of his acute shyness. When he came to Jersey, he begged his mother to find an alternative to those skit-based exercises.

He performed his first play, “A Christmas Carol,” at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, where an agent—the same one he has to this day—spotted and signed him.

By his sixth audition, he’d booked The Sandlot.

Following up that movie with a remake of Lassie, Guiry continued to act through adolescence.

He soon discarded the mantle of ‘tween and teen idol, opting for meatier, R-rated ensemble dramas with marquee directors like Ang Lee (Ride with the Devil) and Joel Schumacher (Tigerland).

“I always knew I wanted to [act] for the rest of my life. I was never too good at anything else—that’s why,” he laughs. “I said, ‘I might as well stick with this and see how long I can do it.’”

His two-semester stab at college was upended by his U-571 shoot and the subsequent arrival of his son Michael (whose mother is a non-actress Guiry met on the set).

Mention his child, and Guiry enthusiastically announces an upcoming visit from the 7-year-old. Apparently he too has been seduced by the charms of his dad’s first hit.

“When he was younger, I tried to throw on The Sandlot. He didn’t want to watch it. But when he was almost six, he saw it [and] loved it. He’d call me up and ask all these questions about the film!”

That’s fine with Guiry—as long as the queries are confined to the family-friendly section of his oeuvre.

“There’s a lot of [my] films I don’t think he’s going to be watching until he gets a lot older!”

See The Black Donnellys

Monday, February 26 at 10 p.m.

NBC (Ch. 10)