Released 26 years ago, the pioneer-cannibal horror movie Ravenous has since become a cult classic. But at the time, the film — which starred Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle and Neal McDonough among others as part of an ensemble cast putting a supernatural spin on the Donner Party story — was a box office bomb, earning back only one-sixth of its $12 million budget. And as McDonough, who is now starring in the third season of the Paramount+ series Tulsa King, told ReMIND in an exclusive interview, the shock of the film’s failure was enough to send him back to his family business in Cape Cod … until Steven Spielberg started calling.

“That was the craziest film I’ve ever been part of,” said McDonough. “And I thought, ‘This film is gonna be huge at the box office,’ and it bombed. And I was just, that’s when I quit the industry. After that, I was like, ‘You know what? Yeah, am I meant for this?’ And that’s when I went back home and worked for my dad at our motel business. We had a small motel in Cape Cod.”

But just a few months after the film’s disappointing March 1999 release, McDonough “got the call: ‘Steven Spielberg is looking for you for a project called Band of Brothers.’ [I said,] ‘What? How does he even know who I am?’ Little did I know, Steven Spielberg loved Ravenous.”

Spielberg produced the star-studded 10-episode 2001 mini-series, co-created with Tom Hanks, which brought together a large cast including McDonough, David Schwimmer, Ron Livingston and Damien Lewis to portray a group of young American paratroopers fighting in World War II.

Everett Collection

Today, McDonough looks back on the experience of playing a 19th century military man under attack by cannibals fondly, despite some production difficulties. “Ted Griffin wrote [Ravenous], and we went through three different directors. We were over in Czech Republic and Slovakia for three or four months. It was crazy, but it was such an enjoyable environment to hang out with all those guys, Guy Pierce and Bobby Carlisle and David Arquette and Jeremy Davies and Jeffrey Jones … It was nuts, but that it’s become such a cult classic, I’m so tickled by it. It was an awesome experience to be part of.”