Before Saving the Shop in ‘Tires' Season 2, Thomas Haden Church Hadn't Heard of the Show

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Planes, Saddles and Automobiles.
Thomas Haden Church began his acting career as the lovable airplane mechanic Lowell Mather on the beloved '90s NBC sitcom Wings. As Phil on Netflix comedy Tires season two, he's the one (gently) bossing the grease monkeys around, including his on-screen son Shane Gillis.
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Church is happy to talk about being on both ends of the socket wrench, though really he's at his happiest relaying the cattle count on his Texas ranch. It's all good — I mostly wanted to talk about Tombstone (1993).
How aware of were you?
Not at all. And I had a connection with an executive at Rough House Pictures, Danny McBride's company (and a Tires production company), because I had another project that they were considering doing like three years ago — something that my partner and I had written. But I got to know this executive Brandon James, and he just reached out to me — it would have been, let's see, probably early September, because I was in London all last summer shooting a film for Netflix. And Brandon reached out to me, and he said, 'Hey, you know, we're doing this show Tires, and we're ramping up for the second season. Would you be interested in playing Shane Gillis' dad?'
I knew who Shane was. I thought Shane was hilarious. And so they sent me some scripts and asked me to watch the show, which I did, and I really, really liked it. I really liked the chemistry. I read the scripts and then I jumped on a call with John McKeever and Steve Gerben — two of the guys that created the show with Shane — and we just had a great first meeting. And they just straight-out said, 'Look, dude, if it's going to be you, then we want to build the character of Phil with you — and Shane, obviously — but we all want to do it with you. Not for you, with you.' It was of the highest order of collaboration. I got there two weeks in advance, and every time they had a script meeting, I was there just pitching ideas and listening and really just becoming a cohesive gear in the machine.
You came in for season two as Shane's dad, Phil. You dress great, you look great, you buy out Valley Forge Automotive to keep your son and nephew employed — how rich is Phil?
He's got the kind of money where he can just show up and be like, 'I want to open half-a-dozen mattress stores, and I want you to manage them.' He's that guy.
What was your response when you found out shoots in Westchester, Pennsylvania?
That was absolutely a major attractant. I did (HBO's) Divorce for three seasons, but it felt like more than that. I lived in New York for the three seasons that we did, and I vowed that I would never do another TV series in New York. Of course, now that I've said that, it's out in the ether. Now I'm gonna get approached to do a series in New York.
But I lived in L.A. for 12 years, and I did two television series in New York. Not terribly long after that, I just moved to Texas and I've been living [there] full time for 24 years now. I sold my house in L.A. in like 2001-2002 and just never looked back.
You went back home.
Yeah. The very first morning I was in L.A., there was like a 6.0 earthquake, and I was like, 'This is not for me.' As soon as I started working and making money, I almost immediately bought a home in Texas. I had a place in Austin for several years in the '90s, and then I sold that place and bought my ranch out here— we live about an hour from San Antonio, and then my ranch is about 90 minutes, give or take, from San Antonio.
It's home. We grew up hunting with my dad, and the very first season of Wings, one of my brothers — who's an attorney in Dallas — was like, 'Do you ever think about deer hunting again?' And I was like, 'Yeah!' He said, 'Why don't we find a place to hunt?' And so we did. We found a ranch to hunt on that's about 20 miles from where I'm sitting right now — that was 35 years ago. And whenever I started hunting again, it just reignited my lifelong dream of owning a real cattle ranch and being a real cattle rancher. And I have been for 26 years. I've kind of downsized because I'm getting older, but I don't know, 10-15 years ago, we had about 400 head, which still not a big operation, but big enough that we were making money at it.
You're a real cowboy, like your character Billy Clanton in . It wasn't easy to make that jump from TV in the '90s — especially for the guy who played Lowell — how did that come about?
So, in the spring of '93 wings, Northern Exposure, Beverly Hills, 90210 and China Beach were all very popular shows, and when Tombstone was casting. The Disney execs apparently sent down to the producers and the writer/director some kind of a note that they wanted the movie to cast some television actors, and that's what they did. And they cast John Corbett (Northern Exposure), they cast Jason Priestley (Beverly Hills, 90210), myself (Wings), and Dana Delany (China Beach), and that's how I got into my first film.
Well, I say Tombstone was my first film, but I had done a TV movie. It wasn't supposed to be a TV movie, but it ended up being a TV movie. I was working with Sam on (the TV movie) and we really hit it off. We were shooting one night, and I had gone in and met with with the [Tombstone] screenwriter Kevin Jarre and the director (George P. Cosmatos). It was just a meeting, it wasn't even an audition. We just talked about the Civil War, because I loved Glory (1989), which he wrote, and the Old West, because I'm kind of a little bit of an Old West history guy. Then I had to go back out to Palm Springs where we were shooting (the TV movie). That night — we were doing some night work — and Sam and I were standing there, and Sam goes, 'May need to get ya on the back of a horse.' I didn't get it. Again he said, 'May need to get ya on the back of a horse.' 'Oh, shit!' I got it. (Sam Elliott voice) 'Congratulations, Thomas, you deserve it.'
And let me tell you something, I went to cowboy school on the back of Sam Elliott. Sam immediately got me with a wrangler friend of his who lived out there in the desert, and I started— every spare minute I had while I was shooting another movie, I would go out riding with this wrangler friend of Sam's. Then after I finished shooting that, Sam had a really good friend in West Texas who had a big ranch, and Sam, he literally told me, goes, 'You're going to go out there and you're going to work as a cowboy for them, because they're doing their their spring roundup — they're marking calves.' And that's what I did. I went out to cowboy on this huge ranch for a month, and then, literally, the day I finished, I drove back to Dallas, and I flew directly from Dallas to Tucson and went to work on Tombstone. When I showed up, I was pretty seasoned in the saddle. But we didn't do a lot of riding in Tombstone, that was always a little bit of a disappointment to me — because we were cowboys.
This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
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