On an unusually warm April Wednesday, the doors of the posh theater district Ritz-Carlton were opened for me, and I was ushered upstairs to the ballroom area. There was a full assortment of beverages and foods in the waiting room where I would wait to interview the recipient of the sixth annual Arts Council Award for Distinguished Achievement - alumnus Tom McCarthy, BC '88 - who was in town to publicize his sophomore film, The Visitor, a stirring take on immigration in the context of a post-Sept. 11 world.
Emerging from a conference room full of reporters, McCarthy, clad in glasses and a blazer, opted to change scenery and sit next to me in the empty reception. With his now-full resume, it's hard to point a finger at exactly where McCarthy's career began. Interestingly, as an undergraduate, he was never involved in theater or film, though he had friends who were involved in these areas. What he did do at Boston College was join My Mother's Fleabag. "That was the beginning of the whole journey for me, really," McCarthy recounted.
It was McCarthy's sophomore year when he joined the famed improvisational and sketch comedy group, and he credits it with having a profound influence on his life. The students with whom he performed and who would eventually be his colleagues - including other famous Fleabag alumni Maile Flanagan, Nancy Walls, and Wayne Wilson - changed his thought process from teenager to adult. Their fields of study and the passions that they were pursuing would inspire him to change his major and school, leaving his accounting concentration in the Carroll School of Management for a philosophy major in the College of Arts and Sciences.
"I just started thinking more independently … and really focusing not on what I thought I should do but what I wanted to do, and I think that that was a big moment for me, because that's something that I now do with my movies. I don't think about movies that I think will be successful. I think about stories that I want to tell and focus on that," McCarthy said.
2008 Woodie Awards
