Holt McCallany Talks Partying With Tom Cruise, Returning To Netflix For ‘The Waterfront’ & Gearing Up For His Directorial Debut

To say Holt McCallany’s career exploded following his breakout role in Netflix’s Mindhunter would be an understatement.

Less than a decade after playing FBI profiler Bill Tench opposite Jonathan Groff’s Holden Ford in the acclaimed serial killer drama, the longtime character actor found himself at the exclusive Soho Farmhouse just outside London, celebrating Tom Cruise’s 60th birthday alongside such entertainment luminaries as Jerry Bruckheimer, Anne Hathaway, Sam Mendes, and James Corden.

“There was a lot of love in the room,” he remembers over Zoom. “Yeah, I suppose it would be easy to say that when you’re the biggest movie star in the world and your films have made billions of dollars at the global box office, it inspires goodwill. But it was more than that. People had flown in from all over the world to be there at that party, and it really was a wonderful event.”

The event was so wonderful, in fact, that McCallany, who was in the United Kingdom for the production of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (currently playing in theaters nationwide; click here for tickets), decided to go all-out for his own 60th celebration the following year at a classic Hollywood institution.

“I shared a car with Esai Morales [who plays The Final Reckoning’s mysterious villain, Gabriel] on the way home and said to him, ‘You know, man? I wasn’t going to throw a party for my 60th, but now that I saw Tom’s party, I know that I have to have a party.’ Mine not was not quite as lavish. I did it at Musso and Frank, just because I happen to like that old school Hollywood vibe. I invited, just as Tom had done, people that had been with me since the beginning of my journey. And it was a really memorable evening, but had I not been invited to Tom’s party, I probably wouldn’t have had one of my own.”

After decades of starring opposite A-listers like Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Jason Statham, Brad Pitt, Rami Malek, and Liam Neeson, and more McCallany says he’s developed a nifty immunity to becoming starstruck. As such, sharing the same space as Cruise, Angela Bassett, and Nick Offerman for the latest Mission: Impossible (his second espionage-related project of 2025 after The Amateur) didn’t seem as daunting as it might have been for an industry neophyte.

“When we get out there on the set, we’re playing for the same team and you have your position to play,” he explains. “If Tom Cruise is like the Tom Brady of movie stars, Tom Brady still needs somebody to throw the ball to. He still needs somebody to block for him. Filmmaking is a team sport … We’re all actors and our job is to try to make this particular scene that we’re shooting on this particular day as good as it can possibly be.”

The Amateur and The Final Reckoning, however, were only the appetizers to McCallany’s action-packed summer, which also includes the release of a brand-new Netflix series, The Waterfront (all eight episodes are now streaming).

Created by slasher maven Kevin Williamson (Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer), the engaging family crime drama molded in the vein of Ozark centers around a North Carolina fishing dynasty forced to smuggle drugs in order to keep itself afloat — no pun intended. “Somebody said to me the other day in an interview, ‘How would you feel if people compared the show to things like Ozark and Succession?’” shares McCallany. “And I said, ‘I’d be very flattered, because those are iconic shows and we should be so fortunate as to be considered in that category.’”

Despite Williamson’s horror background, the writer actually comes from a family of seafaring folk, hence the overtly maritime setting and hook-handed villain of I Know What You Did Last Summer.

“He’s been very open about the fact that his father was, at one time, involved in smuggling — I think it was marijuana — back in the ‘80s. Of course, now people buy marijuana at the corner store, but it wasn’t like that in those days,” says McCallany, who plays Harlan, the grizzled and booze-swigging patriarch of the Buckley clan: wife Belle (Maria Bello), son Cane (Jake Weary), and daughter Bree (Melissa Benoist).

“A lot of the the experiences that Harlan has are drawn from that. It’s kind of semi-autobiographical in a way,” notes the actor. “So I felt an responsibility to really do the character justice. I always feel that. I never want a writer or a director to feel like, ‘Oh, I got the wrong guy,’ or, ‘This guy didn’t understand the character,’ or ‘This guy gave me a performance, but it wasn’t the performance that I wanted.’”

While he’s taken a step back from day-to-day operations in recent years, Harlan (whose methods are ruthlessly old school) is forced to intervene when his son’s recklessness not only draws suspicion from DEA Agent Marcus Sanchez (Gerardo Celasco) but the ire and interest of dangerous criminals like Topher Grace’s Grady.

“I liked the way that Harlan was written and Kevin seemed to like the way that I was playing him,” adds McCallany. “And so, we had this very easygoing kind of relationship, which I was grateful for because above all else, I wanted the experience of shooting The Waterfront to be fun. I really liked the other people in the cast. I love the little town of Wilmington, North Carolina [where we shot] … With a show like Mindhunter, we were always delving into the psychological underpinnings of sexually-motivated homicides and these gruesome murders … It was heavy stuff. It was dark. And this is a different kind of a show. It’s lighter. It’s a crime drama. It’s a family drama, yes, but it has humor and it has sex appeal. I think it’s got a little bit of something for everyone.”

Even with a plethora of acting opportunities on his plate, McCallany has impressively found the time to prep his directorial debut, an American remake of the 1995 Italian film The Star Maker by Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso). In addition to serving as director, the actor also co-wrote the screenplay with collaborator Noel Lawrence and input from David Fincher (whom McCallany has worked with three times since 1992).

“We spent two years in script revisions with David and the thing became exponentially better by an order of magnitude,” he teases. “In the past, whether it was Alien 3, Fight Club, or Mindhunter, I was always working as an actor-for-hire, for David. So you come in, the script is written, the project is already cast, the locations are chosen, and you just have your responsibilities as an actor to execute. It’s very different when you come with a piece of material and say, ‘Hey, how about this?’ I was just really fortunate that he happened to like the thing that I had chosen, so he gave me a lot of his time. That was really valuable to me.”