‘Devotion’s’ director had an ace in the hole: his father, a Black Blue Angel pilot. The son also had a history of alcoholism.
‘I wasn’t doing it to get into the movie at all,’ says O’Donnell. ‘I wasn’t trying to get into the movie at all. I was trying to be a good dad and make a good career for my son because I had a lot of confidence in him. We were all very excited to be in the movie, but everyone in the cast was really excited that it was a chance for me to get some type of role. The first day of shooting, I went down to wardrobe to try on a suit. There was a guy there who took my measurements and was asking me all over again, “How tall are you?”‘
The suit he tried on was the last one he had on, so if it hadn’t fit, there would have been no way to know. He would never know now, because the suit is in his closet in storage with the rest of his clothes. He has it stored in a padded cubicle under the studio’s sound stage in Los Angeles. There’s not even a chance of moving it out of the vault. The only way he can see his collection of suits once they’ve fallen into storage is to go to a storage facility and take the suit out of the box.
‘I’m really into suits,’ he says. ‘The fact that I had a suit that just worked on screen, that I would never have been able to wear out of costume, that’s something I’ll always be grateful for. It was a dream for me to be able to wear that suit. It was the closest thing to my heart, the kind of suit I had never been able to wear. So, I’ll always be grateful that I was able to dress in such a way.’
O’Donnell’s mother is standing behind him, and his father is standing too. It’s almost too
