Family & Fatherhood

The Lights of Kyle Chandler's Life

The Friday Night Lights actor finds strength in his family and inspiration in the memories of his father

Of course Kyle Chandler wants to meet at Tom ­Bergin’s Tavern. On a busy stretch near Beverly Hills known for pretentious, blink-and-they’re-gone nightspots, Bergin’s is the lone holdout—a moody 1930s Irish pub where the trendiest drink on the menu is a shot of 12-year-old whiskey.

“It’s probably a personality flaw in a business like mine, but I prefer to avoid fuss and flash,” says Chandler, settling in on a timeworn banquette. The actor, 41 and enviably handsome, is wearing jeans and an old gray T-shirt and sipping a Guinness. In the dim light of the oak room, with yellowing photos of Seabiscuit and the 1951 Rams behind him, it’s easy to imagine a time when guys like Chandler pursued acting simply as an excuse to ride horses and chase pretty girls. He’s gracious enough, but you get the sense he would rather be having a root canal than blathering on about himself.

You can tell instantly why they picked Chandler to play the imperturbable Texas high school football coach on NBC’s Friday Night Lights. Having spent much of his childhood in Georgia, Chandler has the Southern accent, but he also has the old-school values: Hard work is its own reward. Slow and steady wins the race. And, above all, never ever believe your own hype.

“I’ve been acting for 20 years, and I’m still under the radar, and that’s fine,” he says. “It lets me do what I really want, which is to be a good husband, a good father. I’m quite happy just plodding along.”

Chandler, who has been married to screenwriter ­Kathryn Kyl for a dozen years and has two daughters, Sydney, 11, and Sawyer, 5, makes it sound as if he’s barely scratching out a living in regional theater. But he has, in fact, “plodded” from success to success, even if he never became a household name. As an attractive barmaid tends a bit too closely to Chandler’s slowly emptying pint glass, the actor gives the two-minute recap of a two-decade career.

His first major television role was as a Cleveland Indians outfielder on Homefront, a critically acclaimed series about a group of WWII vets returning to Ohio. Next came Early Edition, on which he played a man who mysteriously receives a copy of The Chicago Sun-Times one day in advance, giving him knowledge of the future. From there, Chandler became a kind of everyhunk with roles as testosterone-fueled as his characters’ names suggest: Jake Evans ( What About Joan), Grant Rashton ( The Lyon’s Den), Mac McGinty ( Capital City), Bruce Baxter ( King Kong). But it was a more ethereal performance, as a bomb-squad agent who is blown to smithereens and comes back to life, that earned Chandler his first Emmy nomination last year for a guest role on Grey’s Anatomy. The Grey’s gig landed him a casting call for Friday Night Lights and a role in this fall’s action thriller The Kingdom. Suddenly, at 40, people were calling Kyle Chandler an overnight success. Needless to say, the actor didn’t buy into any of it.

Naturally, Chandler lives up in Topanga. In a city where your zip code is a key signifier of where you stand on the achievement scale (at least on par with, say, which Montessori school your kids attend), living in the 90290 somehow jams the radar. Up a winding road in the Santa Monica Mountains near Malibu, woodsy Topanga Canyon is a place artists tend to go when they want to be in the entertainment business but not of it. It’s where Neil Young withdrew to record his first solo album and where Dennis Hopper made his L.A. roost.