ED BEGLEY JR
INSIGHT
Ed Begley Junior: “A lot of people want to do something. You’ve got to give them choices that resonate with them.” Actor Ed Begley Junior is one of America’s best-known and longest-standing environmental activists. Fresh from lighting up our screens in the final season of Better Call Saul, Begley spoke to Passive House Plus about the roots of his activism, and what drives him on in the face of such adversity. Words by Jeff Colley
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d Begley Junior’s environmental roots are inextricably linked to his past – including his lived experience as a young man growing up in Los Angeles, and the inherited traits of his Irish forebears. LA at the time was choking so badly on smog from the city’s slavish devotion to the internal combustion engine that it earned the nickname Smell-A. “I grew up in smoggy LA. And that pollution was horrible, it just seared my lungs every day,” he told Passive House Plus, speaking from his LEED Platinum certified eco house in LA’s Studio City district. For Begley, the palpable sense of wrongness in having to breathe in poisoned air struck a nerve. This outrage, combines with ways of living passed down from his Irish grandparents awoke something in the young actor. His grandfather and grandmother hailed from the Kerry towns of Killorglin and Killarney respectively, hardwired with the profound sense of frugality and resourcefulness that typified the generations who came up before the advent of cheap energy and the rise of throwaway consumerism. “It all came from my Irish grandparents, it really did,” Begley says. Having taken the boat to America in the late 1890s, the couple settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where his grandfather, a hod carrier, plied his trade. Begley’s father, Ed Begley Senior took a different path, rising to become a celebrated, Oscar-winning character actor,
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with film credits that include 12 Angry Men. But Begley Sr never lost his Irish parents’ thriftiness, and he passed it onto his son. “I always just revered that part of my past, that frugality,” he says. “My dad was a great influence on me, he was. We would save string and tin foil and turn off the lights and turn off the water. We were never wasteful. I got all that from my dad.” A longstanding vegan and animal rights activist, Begley’s Irish ancestors’ resourcefulness and connection to the environment may have manifested itself more violently. “There's a book somebody sent me called Kerry man,” he says. “Apparently, there's some Kerry people related to me who were quite brave. They would swim into the chilly waters of the Atlantic with somebody in a boat nearby with a rope around them so they didn't drift away, and they would club a seal, and get some seal meat or seal oil for lamps.” Unperturbed by tales of the gregariousness of his ancestors’ proto-environmentalism, Begley, who first visited Ireland with his father in 1966, has notions of returning. “I'd like to get back again while I'm still alive,” he says. I tell him it’s preferable to make the trip when you’re alive. “It’s much better, that I’m told,” he says.
ence, he had an environmental epiphany. But less than a week later, personal tragedy struck. Begley’s father suffered a heart attack and died suddenly and unexpectedly. Heartbroken though Begley must have been – he still talks fondly of his “wonderful dad” – Begley nonetheless threw himself into his budding environmentalism, in spite of his life being upended by the tragedy. With his limited funds, he even bought an early electric vehicle – a $950 Taylor-Dunn which Begley describes as a “golf cart with a windshield wiper and horn,” and a top speed of 32 km/h. He quickly retired it for a vehicle with more horsepower: a bicycle. “I wanted solar panels on my house and a nice electric car that had some range to it. And those things were very much unavailable to me. After my dad passed in 1970, I was a broke, struggling actor,” he says. “So, I got to do just what I could afford, you know – recycling, composting, vinegar and water instead of harsh cleansers, baking soda instead of [American household cleaning product] Comet. All the stuff that I could do that was very cheap, I did.” Years later, having saved money as a consequence of “picking the low hanging fruit”, Begley invested in making the first home he owned
In 1970 Begley bought an early electric vehicle which he describes as a “golf cart with a windshield wiper and horn.
With a nascent environmental movement beginning to gestate in the 1960s, Begley was smack bang in the middle of an event that many people regard to be the birth of the green movement: the first Earth Day, in April 1970. Hearing talk of air and water pollution that chimed with his own experi-
energy efficient. In 1982 Begley landed the role that made him famous, playing Dr Victor Ehrlich in ground-breaking medical drama St Elsewhere, for which he received six consecutive Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe nomination. With his