Eoin Macken | 'The Night Shift' - interview article + new photo [HiRes]
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Evoke.ie: California dreaming: Dubliner Eoin Maken is the new Dr McDreamy as Fair City actor lands US drama role
HE IS set to break hearts in the US starring in a new primetime medical drama - and Dubliner Eoin Macken puts much of his success down to the lessons he learned as a young actor on Fair City.
[click to read]The chiselled 31-year old will appear across millions of US TV screens from next month in the The Night Shift, playing the role of Dr TC Callaghan, an unconventional army doctor who returns from Afghanistan to work in a Texas emergency department.
The role on the NBC network has seen Macken labelled as the next ‘Dr McDreamy’ - a reference to actor Patrick Dempsey’s hugely successful turn as Dr Derek Shepherd in Grey’s Anatomy.
Macken is being tipped for a long and successful career - and he says the RTÉ soap was the perfect training ground.
‘My time on Fair City was really instructive. I had to work every single day and we pretty much shot an episode a day. I had to learn how to do something different every time in such a short space of time.
‘I had to work really hard to try and do something creative with it. It really trained me well. You get a lot of exposure from it as well.
‘I was on 50 episodes and that was a lot of work.’
Macken has previously starred in BBC’s Merlin, the RTÉ series Raw, and The Tudors. He also had a successful career modelling for the likes of Abercrombie & Fitch.But acting has always been his first love: ‘Yes I did modelling, and I still go for the odd job. But all I want to do is act, write and direct, that’s all I wanted to do since college,’ he said.
Macken’s next film is Cold, which he wrote, directed and acted in himself. It also features fellow rising star Jack Reynor. It was during the filming of Cold that Macken was invited to audition for The Night Shift.
‘I was in Ireland when I got a call saying they wanted me to fly to Los Angeles to do a screen test. And I said, “That’s awesome but I can’t do that because I’ve got Cold.” I had the whole thing organised. I couldn’t just turn around after raising all this money and go, “I need to go off and do a screen test in LA.”
‘So I just decided to shoot the audition myself. At the end of the third day of filming, I asked everyone to help me with my audition tape. I did it in about 10 minutes.
‘I sent off the audition tape that night and then on the last day of filming I was in my van and I got a call saying I got the job,’ he said.
The Night Shift premieres straight after America’s Got Talent, which has an average of 10 million viewers.
That gives the series an ideal platform for success.