SPEAKING OF SECOND ACTS, MEET 81-YEAR-OLD NEIL BURGHARD.
Burghard spent almost the entirety of his career working alongside his father in the wholesale food industry outside Chicago. For fun, he dabbled in community theater. Today, he’s a busy actor whose credits include a Super Bowl commercial, the lead in a few independent films, and appearances on NBC shows “Chicago Fire,” “Chicago Med,” and “Chicago P.D.”
“I retired in 2002 and just fooled around taking vacations and going on cruises, and then I started to get this feeling there’s got to be more to life than this. I guess I was bored,” he says. “A friend of mine from church was doing ‘extra’ [acting] work, and been very happy with it and had a couple successes, and suggested I give it a try.”
So at age 75, Burghard jumped full-on into acting. He now has two agents, in Chicago and North Carolina, actively seeking roles for him, and his success in front of the camera has been a boon both professionally and personally. In fact, his only complaint is he doesn’t get to do it enough. “I would be doing this seven days a week, 24 hours a day if I could. I love every part of it,” he says.
What kind of roles does a septuagenarian newcomer to the acting world get? Here’s a peak at a few:
• “Hum”: a short film out of Toronto in which Burghard played a man who was exhibiting the beginnings of dementia. “The whole story is about me and my grandson; it was very sweet,” he says of the film that was partially subsidized by the Alzheimer’s Society of Canada.
• Indie film “My Heart Is All I Have”: “It’s about a gentleman in nursing home and a gal who was the matriarch of the nursing home,” he says. “I come in and am the new man and all women are crazy about me, and we have a love affair and then I die. That’s the way it goes.”
• “Countdown To Midnight”: “I just finished this movie. I play Jim Jones, remember him? I’m that low-life person and one of my most ardent lovers left the flock years ago and had been recruited by FBI to make contact with me and infiltrate and persuade me not to do this, to break up the operation and stop me.”
• Sharonview Federal Credit Union commercial, which aired during Super Bowl LI: “I play a grandfather and I have a grandson and we are very close and he knows in my youth I had a red convertible. At first it was shown only on the East Coast during the Super Bowl but now it plays at some theaters [across the country] before the movies begin. I’ve seen myself three or four times.”
“These are four completely different roles, which gives me an opportunity to stretch my acting,” says Burghard, who adds portraying the man with dementia was particularly challenging. “I loved it, the character was very different from me so I had to take on an entirely different persona” for the role.
In Burghard’s view, the most common stereotype of aging adults both on screen and off is that they have all lost their ability to make decisions. “I think the most common misconception is, when you age you lose your abilities to think and act,” he says.
“I might be a little extraordinary because I play pickle ball four times a week, growing up I was very athletic, so I’m different than the common perception of what people would say an 80 year old is, but I like that audiences can look at me and think, maybe they have that to look forward to. They can think, ‘I don’t have to look forward to only being in a wheel chair, I can look forward to being active in my old age.’
“I want audiences to go away enjoying the experience, enjoying the acting and the experience of seeing the movie or TV show or whatever,” he says. “If that happens, I’m happy.”
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