Dominic Purcell Appreciation Thread #1, 'cause he is crazy!! but very funny!

THE PRISON BREAK STAR BROKE OUT OF HIS SELF-MADE PRISON TO CREATE A NEW LIFE. LEARN HOW TO FASHION YOUR OWN

There’s a long string of surf communities on the California coast between L.A. and San Diego. You’ve probably heard of most of them, all bearing the name “Beach”: Redondo, Long, Newport, Huntington, Laguna. In some fortunate spots along that stretch, dramatic hills rise within sight of the sand, and the houses hanging from them look as if they were stacked there by a 4-year-old with several thousand house-sized Legos. They’re stuffed at random angles within feet of one another, some echoing Spanish design, some sporting lots of glass, some featuring nothing special except a jaw-dropping view of the Pacific. San Clemente, farther south than all the above, is like this, but according to Dominic Purcell, it has one thing the others don’t: “World-class waves, man.”

Purcell, 38, is an actor, of course, and also a dad and a dude, but if you had to pick one word to sum up what he is, it would have to be “surfer.” He surfs every day. When he’s working on his show, Prison Break, more than an hour north in Hollywood, he crashes at a friend’s place in Venice and wakes up at 4 in the morning to surf, using the lights from the pier to see the waves. On his days off, he motors down to San Clemente and surfs all day. He gushes about T Street, a collection of reefs and sandbars in the San Clemente surf that produces those giant waves. He uses terms like “gnarly,” “dude,” and “awesome” without fear. Today, a glimmering October day, Purcell pulls up to his place in a pickup truck full of buddies, sandy boards, and dripping wetsuits.

This is the life, you might say. You might also say, This is not my life. But here’s the thing: Purcell has earned this. He’s designed his lifestyle out of necessity, almost urgency, in fact. And he’s found that that’s where the best living comes from—designing an honorable lifestyle and sticking by it. That’s something anyone can and must do, because in the end no one will do it for you. You see, Purcell has been sober for 5 years now. And he really needed to be sober. He’s also recently separated from his wife, and is the father of four beautiful kids. (I can personally attest to their California looks; I saw the photos.) These are all positives, and you’ll see why in a minute.

Purcell racks his board in the garage and lays his wetsuit on the concrete outside his front door to dry. His condo is a 2-minute walk up the hill from the beach. The building has four units—two on top, two below—and Purcell owns both lower condos. In the back, a concrete veranda overlooks a sizable backyard with dirt ramps for his kids’ bike adventures. The property butts up against a park. You can see the ocean from virtually any window. His buddies crash on weekends in the spare unit, and Purcell’s long-term plan is to own the whole building, break out some walls, and create a great space.

But right now, his condo is just about the ideal guy house: simple, easily maintained, all pretenses banished. He hasn’t overfurnished. Big, framed black-and-white photos of his kids lean against the stone fireplace. A Prison Break script sits on the living room sofa. To Purcell, the real valuables are in the garage: a rack of surfboards, a few dirt bikes of varying sizes for his kids, and his battle-scarred green Dodge pickup.

After he shows me around, Purcell and I sit for a while in his living room, and he tells me how in the hell he got here. Emphasis on hell.

By necessity, the drinking and the marriage had to end. Purcell, as breezy and laid-back as his new hometown is, was never about the cool buzz. He was more of a fever drunk. He’d work all week, then on Friday bring out the vodka and the pills, draw the blinds, and “just annihilate myself. I’d have 3-day blackouts. When I was on the road, like in New York City, I’d wake up in alleyways, like, ‘What happened?’ ”

Purcell, who was born in Ireland, grew up in Australia, and speaks with a hybrid American-Aussie accent, describes himself as the consummate alpha male: driven, competitive, willing to die for success or victory. For many years, this fueled a bottomless appetite. “The thing is, if you’re extreme, you’re screwed. You have normal people like my ex who can sit on a glass of wine all night long. Me, I don’t just want one glass or even one bottle. I’m the guy who wants to drink all the bottles. I can’t do anything in moderation. Surfing, working, working out—I’m an extremist in everything I do. I’ve accepted that. It’s the way I am.”

The interesting thing is that you can sort of see this in Purcell. Raymond Chandler once described a man’s jaw as a park bench. That fits Purcell. The guy’s the size of a linebacker, about 6'2", thick with muscle and festooned with ink. Shaved head. You can picture his extremism. You can imagine him feverish with booze and flying off any and all rails.

He refuses to say what specific event made him stop drinking, but it must have been a corker, because here’s what he will tell me: “I had that full bottom. I was in New York City. I decided the morning after to stop drinking. And after that, I was suicidal for a weekend. I was on my hands and knees crying my ass off. For a couple of days I had that gnarly experience that my life was over. I was just like, ‘I have to end my life.’ It was that heavy. Then I got on the phone to a friend and he said, ‘I’m taking you to AA. You need to hang with me.’

“I did that. It took about 2 months after the bad thing happened, 2 months in the program to finally, after all the shit that I had done through my entire life as a boozer, say to myself, You are an alcoholic. It took me that long to admit it to myself. I spent the next year sober, dealing with demonic shit, all the things inside that made me self-medicate. And I’m doing this with nothing to fall back on. It was just me and my reflection. It was heavy.”

The separation, on the other hand, was an ice-cream cone with sprinkles by comparison, probably one of the most amicable you’ll ever hear about. His sobriety no doubt helped keep it that way. It was literally a case of two people who had been together for 12 years looking at each other and mutually deciding it was over. “We haven’t gotten an attorney or a mediator,” he says. “I just said to Rebecca, ‘Look, you have the house in the Valley, you have the beach house in Laguna, because one, you deserve it, and two, the kids are with you. I don’t have a problem with that. I want the mother of my kids to be of sound mind, spirit, soul, the whole thing.”

All he really needs, he says, is the place here in San Clemente, time with his kids, and some sweet waves, and he’s fine. “It’s funny, because in Hollywood, people say to my ex, ‘You gotta have a lawyer! He’s going to screw you!’ And she’s saying, ‘No, you don’t get it. Dom doesn’t really care about money.’ And I don’t. I don’t want to sound like I’m some kind of great guy. But I’ve never been materialistic. I’m here, I’m happy.”

A New Place

We take a walk down the hill to the beach. A sandy bike trail runs the length of the coast as far as you can see, along with a set of commuter-train tracks. As we walk toward the pier, a passenger train zips by. Three bikini-clad teenage girls on the beach run up and moon it.

“There you go,” Purcell says, arms outstretched. “Welcome to San Clemente.”

The waves are big enough here that when they crash, you feel it in your chest. A surfer catches one, and Purcell roots for him under his breath. “He made that drop. Awesome. There you go. Nice.” Purcell tells me he still has his surfer’s high from his own rides earlier today. Surfing has become his substitute addiction. In front of us, the San Clemente pier is alive with Sunday afternoon crowds. Not a frown in town.

“For people in beach towns, certainly in San Clemente, it’s really all about kicking back,” he says. “It’s all about enjoying life. We all like to surf; we all like to escape. I’ve always been drawn to the coast. Something about the ocean puts me at ease. If I’m gone long, I start getting tweaked out. But if I’m by the water, I start loosening up. Maybe it’s the horizon, you know? There’s nothing in my way.”

San Clemente is symbolic of the new life Purcell was forced to start after he separated from his wife. He purposely searched for a home here because of the legendary waves. He knew he’d find them, but he was a bit surprised by what else he found: “As soon as I moved here, I went to an AA meeting, and all these guys there were, like, ‘Whoa, it’s the dude from Prison Break.’ I was embraced immediately. I didn’t have a choice in the matter.”

Now this core group of eight or nine guys is not just a support team, but a group of true friends. “All the guys I hang out with are hard-core dudes,” he says. “They’ve done some bad stuff in their lives. Some have spent time in jail. But you meet them and they’re just stand-up, straight-up guys. They’re at the point in their lives now where they’re all about family and being loyal to one another. I’ve never had that before. That’s the kind of positive influence I need right now.”

Purcell’s life is remarkably simple these days. An average day goes like this: Wake up, surf, go to work on Prison Break till 8:30 p.m., hit the gym hard for 45 minutes, go to bed. On breaks from the show, he takes movie roles, including one in the upcoming Joel Schumacher thriller Creek. On weekends, he surfs and goes to his kids’ soccer games or has them over to his place. (He’s particularly jazzed about the soccer. Purcell’s great-great-grandfather was a captain for Scotland back in the day, and an uncle played for Liverpool.) Predictably, Purcell is that dad on the sidelines:

“That’s my boy!” he’ll crow. “Scored nine goals!”

That’s the extreme man rearing his shaved head, and Purcell knows it. He’s given a lot of thought to the concept of the alpha male, how the traits that drove him to succeed also brought him trouble. What’s interesting is that those very traits—competitiveness, the drive to succeed, to dominate, to conquer—are generally considered virtues in the male world. Aren’t we all encouraged to be more aggressive, go for what we want, and, by god, get things done?

“A lot of my close friends are world-class athletes,” Purcell says. “I know some of the best surfers in the world. And we all have a similar desire to succeed. With that desire to succeed, you have to have ruthlessness. You have to. You also have to have selfishness. As a young man, you allow that to be all-consuming. But I’ve realized that you must keep yourself aware and try to mellow out with that, because it doesn’t serve the people around you. Very alpha male, very driven, very ambitious—they’re good qualities, but they’re also qualities that can mess you up.”

But how does a man, any man—you, me, the other guy—mellow out the male need to succeed? Or at least rein it in enough so it can be controlled? Perhaps we can’t. Purcell couldn’t—“I took myself out of the game, big time”—but what he was able to do was channel his alpha male tendencies toward positive things: surfing, working, working out, teaching sports to his kids. Structure saved him.

“I think I’m going have ‘balance’ tattooed on my forearm,” he says, “because it’s a big word that keeps popping up for me. Finding balance and moderation is hard for me, because extremists can’t do anything in moderation. I can’t eat ice cream without eating a whole bucket. We self-medicate to take ourselves out of mundane reality or what we perceive to be mundane reality. It’s when you stop and look inside that you realize what you thought was mundane is actually not.”

Your Place

Back at Purcell’s condo, the conversation winds down. He prepares to visit his kids. He tells me he’s off for the next few days, so there will be serious surfing to do. His self-made lifestyle continues to be carved in stone as much as it can, because it can no longer be expected to form through instinct and desire alone. The good stuff, as Purcell calls it, requires effort.

“The big thing for me,” he says, “is to remember to be humble. I attribute all the good stuff to allowing myself to be humble and trying not to expect too much of myself. To just do the best I can. And it’s very hard to do that. It’s a muscle you have to exercise in your head. It’s like, ‘You know what? I can’t control everything. I’ve got to let it go.’” He smiles. “That’s what I’ve been working on.”

In a way, we all are. I certainly am, but I sometimes wonder how well. As I sit at the airport waiting to board the red-eye back to the East Coast, my second tall India Pale Ale sits in front of me as I watch the Red Sox play the Angels in the playoffs. Sitting next to me, former Mets pitcher and current TBS announcer Ron Darling nurses a Jack and Coke. Just one. For an hour and a half. He’s clearly one of those “normal” folks Purcell was talking about, doing his New York Times crossword and barely noticing the game, yet no less alpha. Pro ballplayers simply can’t be less alpha. So what makes him able to sit on one glass of go-go juice for so long? I don’t ask him. I just order another and ponder it.

Grazie Katia,
che dire Dom apparentemente può sembrare un pò sgorbutico,ma alla fine credo sia solo riservatezza la sua,ci tiene alla sua famiglia e vuole proteggerla da tutto quello che è il mondo dello spettacolo. Apprezzo che ammetti i suoi errori ma soprattutto che abbia saputo fare ammenda. Bravo Dom un bel 10 pieno!