John McConnell

John McConnell — better known to New Orleans locals as 'Spud' — is one of those character actors you've definitely seen without knowing his name. Born November 13, 1958, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (TMDB), he's built a career that's quietly remarkable: more than 40 film credits spanning scrappy Gulf Coast independents and genuine Hollywood releases. What's striking is how thoroughly his identity is tied to a single city. New Orleans isn't just his base — it's practically his co-star.

His most visible big-screen moment came with the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?, though he's the kind of performer who tends to elevate whatever he's in rather than dominate it. On television, McConnell appeared across three seasons of Roseanne alongside his friend John Goodman (Wikipedia), and later landed a recurring role on FX's The Riches, starring Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver. That FX credit is probably his most recent widely-seen TV work, though hard to say if anything has followed since.

The thing nobody mentions is that McConnell's fame in Louisiana has less to do with his film work and more to do with two very specific things: his long-running portrayal of Governor Huey P. Long in the one-man stage show The Kingfish — including an off-Broadway run — and his embodiment of Ignatius J. Reilly, the beloved slob-philosopher from John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces. That performance was so definitive that McConnell became the physical model for the life-sized bronze statue of Reilly now standing on Canal Street in downtown New Orleans (Wikipedia). A statue. Not nothing. Away from screens and stages, he's also a conservative talk radio host, running 'The Spud Show' on WWL 870 AM and 105.3 FM — a daily call-in program that's kept him a fixture in the city's public life.