There’s An Alternate Timeline In Which Young Ed O’Neill Didn’t Get Into Acting But Rather Organized Crime

What if Ed O’Neill never got into acting Would Married…with Children have been the same with a different Al Bundy What if Craig T. Nelson had actually played Jay Pritchett on Modern Family, as he almost did As it happens, there’s an alternate timeline in which the actor never became an actor. In this one, he instead gets involved in…organized crime.

Per The Hollywood Reporter, O’Neill recently appeared on fellow Modern Family alum Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s podcast Dinner on Me, where he reflected on his younger days. Back in 1969, when he was in his 20s, O’Neill was struggling to find work in his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio. One day a friend offered him a job, of sorts.

“We’re driving and he said, ‘How you doing You know, you, you got cut, you got no money,” O’Neill recalled. “I said, ‘No, I’m broke. You know, I don’t know what I’m going to do.’”

This friend, named Jim, then took O’Neill to a bar, where O’Neill watched him do some shady business:

“He started talking to the bartender,” O’Neill said of Jim. “He says, ‘I’m looking for this kid, his name is whatever, Demko, his name is Jimmy Demko, do you know him’ And the guy says, ‘No, it doesn’t ring a bell.’ So he gives him $20, and he says, ‘Look, he’s an old friend of mine, I haven’t seen him in years, you know, I’m looking to reconnect, but I’d like to surprise him. So if he comes in again, you can call this number, you can reach me.”

The exchange eventually turned into a job offer once O’Neill and his friend left the bar. “We left and he said, ‘You can do this kind of stuff for me, you know, I’ll protect you. I’ll give you easy stuff. Just you collect here. You do that. You run, you drop something off here and there. You know you may have to lean on a guy. You’re good at that. You can make some good money.’”

Thing is, O’Neill actually considered it. He told Jim he’d “think about it.” He even talked about with his father. His father was blunt, asking him, “Can you do time” O’Neill realized he couldn’t.

So instead of getting into organized crime, O’Neill kept pursuing the acting thing. Eventually it paid off, and then some. But try to imagine a timeline in which instead of, say, playing an undercover cop on one of the first episodes of Miami Vice — to say nothing of starring in the early aughts revival of Dragnet — O’Neill spent time in the slammer.