Before The Shield's Vic Mackey, Michael Chiklis Played A Very Different TV Cop

Michael Chiklis may have made TV history as the brutal LAPD detective Vic Mackey in one of the greatest crime dramas of all time, but for fans of "The Commish," he'll always be the endearingly lovable Tony Scali.

The '90s ABC dramedy centered on Scali's life as a small-town police commissioner who investigated crimes in the fictional New York town of Eastbridge. Chiklis' Anthony "Tony" Scali engaged audiences by being the complete opposite of the fearsome and morally ambiguous Vic Mackey: His approach to police work was always defined by his empathy and sense of humor. Despite the sharp contrast between the two roles, Chiklis revealed that he owed much of his portrayal of Mackey to the experience of playing the Tony Scali. 

"Given the choice between doing the right thing and the wrong thing, Tony would choose the right thing every single time," Chiklis told Steve Kmetko in an interview on the Still Here Hollywood podcast. "He knew he was in a powerful position, he was a police commissioner, and [his decisions have] consequences." Chilkis intentionally strayed away from how he played Tony to find Vic's edge. "It made me think of a guy like Mackey who was fueled more by id and ego and ... so morally bereft."

When Michael Chiklis first tried out for "The Shield," he figured that shaking off his reputation as the kindly Tony Scali would be an uphill battle. As it turns out, he was right. "There was resistance amongst our casting folks when they heard he wanted to come and audition, like, 'He's really wrong for this,'" recalled "The Shield" creator Shawn Ryan to Entertainment Weekly in a 2022 oral history of the crime drama. Even though Chiklis reportedly "embodied" the part of Vic Mackey during his audition, the crew had lingering doubts about hiring the man behind Tony Scali. "The fact that we cast the Commish to play the most testosterone-driven bad*ss possibly in the history of TV was ... a miracle," explained Peter Liguori, an executive producer for "The Shield."

"When your bosses know what the script is about and what you're going to do, and then you approach them and say, 'By the way, we're going to cast Michael Chiklis" and the first answer is, 'The Commish?!' It takes a special amount of fortitude." Luckily, the star's history of playing "affable" male leads made him all the more determined to break through his typecast shell as the merciless Vic Mackey. Chiklis' performance in the acclaimed first season of "The Shield" would ultimately earn him an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. Since the final season of "The Shield" aired in 2008, he has appeared in a number of prominent crime dramas, from "Gotham" to "Coyote."