Carroll O’Connor on playing Archie Bunker: ”It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done as an actor.”

“There’s more pressure on it.”

Playing a lovable bigot is no easy task, but Carroll O’Connor was able to do it for nine seasons on All In the Family, and then some. While O’Connor has expressed in several interviews that he was nothing like Archie Bunker, when speaking to The Columbia Record, he confessed of playing Archie, “It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done as an actor.”

O’Connor continued, “Working in movies first has helped, but most of it’s been developed in the last year or so. This is like being on stage, but there’s more pressure to it.”

The other issue with O’Connor’s creative process was that he didn’t allow himself much preparation when getting ready to act as the Bunker patriarch. For example, of the character’s facial expressions, he said, “I can’t work on ’em. It’s an acting problem. I have to feel the reaction very strongly. I have to be in character constantly.”

He explained, “I can’t ever lose ‘Archie.’ I have to make myself be ‘Bunker’ when I react, and the reaction must be natural. The expressions can either set up the next line or just be a pure reaction. Occasionally they aren’t real because my concentration is off, and if it happens often, I’m in trouble. It’s quite a problem.”

But no matter how hefty the problem, the reception of the character was worth all the trouble. specifically, O’Connor commented on viewers being able to see their own lives and the lives of others in the Bunker family. The actor said, “The people, for the most part, like the reality of the family relationships. Of course, I don’t know what that says about American family life.” “They relate us to people they know because they do know ‘Edith,’ ‘Gloria,’ and ‘Mike’ somewhere. Of course, ‘Archie’ is a member of some family everywhere. They know him, unlike the other so-called ‘heroes’ on TV.”

Similarly, many actors try their hardest to forget about the roles that brought them so much success. Whether it’s sheer exhaustion from being identified with the same person over and over, or a desire to leave the past where it belongs, some stars just can’t shake the roles that made them famous.

In Carroll O’Connor’s case, it wasn’t that he wanted to forget about the time he spent playing Archie Bunker in All in the Family. Bunker had been a longtime companion to O’Connor, and brought him success on at least two series. Moreover, playing someone like Archie Bunker wasn’t something that the actor took slightly.

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, Bud Yorkin, an executive producer for All in the Family, said, “Carroll was a man who took everything very seriously. He wouldn’t accept everything. Some people might have found that difficult, but he was just trying to make it better. I thought he was a terrific performer. And I can’t imagine anyone else doing that role.”

So above all else, more than he was Archie Bunker or any other one of his roles, O’Connor was an actor. To do the best job possible, he had to put the role first, before everything else, in order to be fully submerged in the character, and hopefully, produce the best television content possible.
This is most likely why, according to The Los Angeles Times, O’Connor refused to talk about All in the Family during his time on the set of his new series, In the Heat of the Night. Anne-Marie Johnson, who worked with O’Connor on In the Heat of the Night, said, “When he was working on the show, he never mentioned Archie Bunker.” Johnson, who played Althea Tibbs, stated of her costar, “Carroll was a character actor, and he looked upon this as an amazing acting challenge.”

Indeed, a character like Chief Gillespie was about as far from Archie Bunker as anyone could get, so O’Connor was smart to keep the two separate.