It’s the longest eight seconds in sports, a cowboy in bullet-proof vest, precariously perched atop nearly a ton of angry, bucking bovine, holding on with one hand, trying to win style points along the way. And the suddenly hot Professional Bull Riders circuit provides a naturally dramatic backdrop for The Last Rodeo, a feature opening this weekend on more than 2,200 U.S. screens.
Veteran actor Neal McDonough produced, co-wrote and stars in The Last Rodeo, its traditionally feel-good story line an outgrowth of his and producer-wife Ruve McDonough’s growing love for PBR, which has a significant presence in the film. The couple are so enamored of the circuit that they even became part-owners of PBR’s Austin Gamblers team franchise.
Neal McDonough in ‘The Last Rodeo’
McDonough plays Joe Wainwright, a long-retired 50-something bull-riding world champ who gets back on the bucking beast to raise money to treat his mortally ill grandson, facing a brain tumor. McDonough co-wrote the story with Derek Presley and long-time director Jon Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes, Justified).
The bull-riding circuit is a long way from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where McDonough grew up (and where I, full disclosure, went to high school in Hyannis with one of his older brothers, though I didn’t meet Neal until 25 years later, at the premiere party for his movie Walking Tall).
McDonough has a long string of Hollywood credits, including roles in blockbuster movies such as Minority Report and Star Trek: First Contact, and lengthy runs in TV shows such as Band of Brothers, Arrow, Desperate Housewives, Boomtown, Justified, and Suits, and as voice talent in Call of Duty games and numerous Marvel animated series. More recently, McDonough has a substantive role throughout the second season of Taylor Sheridan’s Tulsa King, an organized-crime series starring Sylvester Stallone.
But McDonough and his wife have also gradually gotten more involved on entertainment’s business side, progressively producing bigger and bigger independent films leading up to The Last Rodeo, which he told me had a production budget of $8 million, his biggest yet.
The film is being distributed by Angel Studios, which focuses on films that “amplify light,” and are frequently faith-based.
Angel’s unusual business model – all films and series are approved by the Angel Guild, a million-strong group of subscribers who reliably turn out for the projects they embrace – removes a lot of risk, and pressure, for the makers of a small project, McDonough said.
“The Angel Guild, when they vote for something, they’ll support it 100 percent,” McDonough said. “They’ll even buy tickets for people who can’t afford it.”
Like many Angel projects, The Last Rodeo includes a bit of Bible reading alongside the bull riding. It’s definitely aw-shucks safe for families. And of course, you can probably guess how it turns out: the good guys win, but the “bad” guys also say they’re sorry, and shake hands.
“Enough of all this darker stuff; Let’s make something that talks to the heartland of America,” McDonough said. “We get to touch on that in writing and producing these films. Give us the opportunity where we don’t have to be the bad guy.”
The two-hour film takes a while to set up Wainwright’s many challenges: a former alcohol problem, age, a battered body, a dead wife, and a semi-estranged daughter. The grandson’s headache turns out to be a glioma, and insurance only covers a portion of the gargantuan cost of life-saving brain surgery.
In keeping with the straightforward spirit of these kinds of projects, the film doesn’t interrogate the cost of health care in America, or the limitations of insurance companies. But it does tell a story that surely will resonate well with Angel’s target audience, and with fans of bull riding, a niche regional sport that has boomed internationally lately.
The Professional Bull Riders circuit has become so popular, in fact, that it’s now owned by TKO Group Holdings, the public company spun off earlier this year from Endeavor Group. TKO’s other holdings include UFC, WWE and IMG. And PBR now stages dozens of events annually across the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Australia. For The Last Rodeo, PBR saddled up almost as much as McDonough.
“It feels like you’re watching a PBR event,” McDonough said. “We used their bulls and riders and arenas. It’s a great setting to do a sports movie.”
The film also conveys some of bull riding’s unique aspects. Technically, though riders compete with each other, they’re really competing against the clock, to stay on the specific bucking behemoth they’ve drawn for an endless eight seconds. And given the risks to the riders and support staff in the ring amid the bulls, everyone does a group prayer at the start of each event.
“In most sports, half the people watching hate the other half,” McDonough said. In PBR, “Throughout the whole evening, everyone is rooting for the riders to get 8 seconds. You’re watching the athletes. If you fall off, they’re there to pick you up. That’s a healthy, competitive spirit. It’s a family(-oriented) culture, a family atmosphere.”
McDonough, 58 and fit, but decades past his high school days playing football and hockey, did not essay riding an actual bull as part of the film. But it was him riding a mechanical bull for multiple takes, getting repeatedly tossed onto piles of surrounding dirt.
“That mechanical bull, when you ride it over and over and over again, you get the snot beaten out of you,” McDonough said. “Landing on that hard dirt, I got busted up a lot,” though not, thankfully for the production’s sake, as much as his character does.
McDonough, who lives in California, shot the film in Texas and Oklahoma. But he, like many in Hollywood, would love the state of California to do more to keep production in-state.
“It’s awful for the industry,” McDonough said. “I wish the governor was doing more to make it enticing. California has whatever you want for backdrops.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to propose in the next few weeks more than doubling, to $750 million, the state’s tax incentives to keep filming at home.
Separately, actor Jon Voigt, one of President Donald Trump’s three “special ambassadors to Hollywood,” proposed several possible solutions in a recent letter, including a $7.5 billion national incentive package to keep jobs and filming in the United States. For his part, Trump has called for a 100% tariff on overseas films, though the White House quickly walked that back, and seemingly no one knows how such a proposal might work, given a lack of details.
Regardless, making The Last Rodeo allowed McDonough a chance to reconnect with one of his favorite experiences growing up, riding horses with his father, and regular family trips to see the Kentucky Derby in Louisville. Now, he’s taking advantage of breaks in the shooting schedule of Tulsa King to write and produce more projects of his own.
“Tulsa King has been great. That (filming hiatus) gives me time to write other scripts, or prepare for other films,” McDonough said. His next project “depends on when the schedule ends. Two weeks later, I guarantee we will be working on another project.”
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