Cowboys & Indians / April 2010 / Noah Wyle

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Noah Wyle

When you think of Noah Wyle, you probably picture him in a lab coat or scrubs as Dr. John Carter, his starring role in the enduring NBC hit television series ER. For 11 years, millions of viewers followed Dr. Carter’s transformation from a young and idealistic intern to a seasoned yet still compassionate and accomplished doctor. But picture this: Off-screen, Wyle is likely to be found decked out in a full beard and faded blue jeans at his Santa Ynez, California, ranch, purchased in 1999 from Bo and John Derek. Wyle grew up horseback and has always valued the ranch lifestyle, which today he is intent on imparting to his children, ages 4 and 7. On the ranch, Wyle and his family care for dozens of rescued animals. “I think when you’re named Noah, you are destined for a certain way of life,” he jokes.

Wyle was born in Hollywood in 1971. His grandfather had a love for the West and moved from Chicago to Los Angeles in the 1950s to found Wyle Laboratories, a company that did environmental testing for NASA. More than a decade before Noah was born, his grandfather bought a cattle ranch in a town called North Fork, about an hour south of Yosemite National Park. Throughout Wyle’s childhood, summer vacations and family gatherings at the ranch were made up of lots of riding and lots of hard work. “Some of us learned to ride as young as 3 or 4,” Wyle says. “That ranch was my indoctrination to horses and cattle.”

Following in the footsteps of his older sister, Alexandra, Wyle attended The Thacher School in Ojai, California, one of the oldest boarding schools on the West Coast. Founded in 1889 by Sherman Day Thacher, the school’s philosophy is based on the Old West principle that “there’s something about the outside of a horse that’s good for the inside of a boy.”

“As soon as you arrive at the school they put you on a horse to assess your equine ability,” Wyle says. “Freshmen are each given a horse that becomes their personal responsibility. You stall your horse every morning before class, ride daily, and feed twice a day. The campus is immense and has access to trails that run up through the Sespe Mountain range, and you can just disappear on your horse after classes.”

But his love affair with horses hasn’t always been a carefree trot in the hills. Before Wyle made it to Thacher, he had an accident that soured him on horses for several years. When he was just 11 years old, he was visiting his sister at school when the show horse she was riding spooked and kicked Wyle in his Achilles tendon. Fortunately, the tendon didn’t rupture, but Wyle had to wear a cast for months. “I was real skittish around horses, and they felt it,” he recalls. “It took a long time for me to be able to calm myself down around horses so they didn’t perceive me as a threat.”

By the time Wyle headed off to Thacher for himself, he was ready to saddle up once again, but he had some big shoes to fill. His older sister was the top-rated English rider at the school when he arrived. An accomplished senior to his lowly freshman status, Alexandra had won the school’s equine trophy three years in a row. After graduating, she kept her horses all the way through veterinary school, and now she and her husband have an equine surgical practice in Salinas, California.

Wyle says the school gave him a sense of responsibility at an age when he didn’t want any. “The school takes kids from all over the world with various socioeconomic backgrounds, and it was a great leveler. Everyone is out shoveling horse poop at 5:30 in the morning together. There is also a great sense of camaraderie that comes out when you are training for gymkhanas or rodeo events.”

Armed with the discipline instilled at Thacher, Wyle went straight to Hollywood and started down the difficult path of earning a living as an actor. After a few movie and TV parts, Wyle, just 22 years old, landed the role of Dr. Carter on ER, which debuted in 1994. Wyle went on to star in 254 episodes of the highly successful medical drama, which ran for 15 seasons and earned a record 124 Emmy nominations.

Wyle enjoyed his success, but just like on his grandfather’s ranch, it was a lot of work. Over the years, the hundreds of 80-hour weeks began to consume the actor, who started to think that it would be nice to have a place to get away to on the weekends. So when he and his wife, Tracy (from whom he recently separated), found out that John and Bo Derek’s ranch in central California was for sale, they eagerly purchased the property.

The Santa Ynez Valley was home to one of the original California missions, and the ranch itself dates back to the ’40s. Avid horse people, the Dereks had as many as 27 horses on the property and ran a highly successful training facility there working with Paso Finos.

“Over the last 10 years we have populated the property with all sorts of wonderful creatures,” Wyle says. “We’ve got rescued goats, chickens, dogs, cats, and potbellied pigs, as well as miniature horses and quarter horses. We just keep collecting these animals.”

The first to come aboard were six Vietnamese potbellied pigs that the Wyles got from the woman who runs Lil Orphan Hammies, a rescue organization that houses anywhere from 200 to 300 of these creatures. Other animals on the ranch include two miniature horses named Bonnie and Clyde that arrived at the ranch on Wyle’s birthday several years ago. “They’re great animals,” Wyle says. “The only problem is that they have delicate constitutions and can colic easily. We are very careful about the kinds of grasses we feed Bonnie and Clyde.”

The ranch has a huge corral with a covered enclosure so the minis have access to both indoor and outdoor living, while the quarter horses are pastured most days and rotated into the barn’s in-and-out stalls at night. Wyle’s horse CC (registered name is Chromed Clone) is a chestnut with extensive white markings. CC was trained as a cutting horse, a discipline Wyle says he would love to pick up again, as he did a bit of cutting as a boy. Wyle finds riding meditative and plans on spending more time on CC’s back as his children get older. “But even now we bring him horse cookies and carrots every day,” he says.

Wyle describes a typical day at the ranch: “It is idyllic for the kids. I have wonderful memories of my grandfather’s ranch, where I was free to explore, had chores to do, and was able to create my own fantasy life‚ which is increasingly rare these days. Our days are all about collecting eggs, cleaning out stalls, and learning about life cycles in nature.

“Both of our horses are now ridable and the rainy weather is about over, so we are beginning to saddle up again. I still love to trail ride, but unfortunately when you have young kids the long romantic rides you used to take with your wife become few and far between. It’s now more about putting your kids on a horse’s back and walking around the arena. Our horse life is currently about halters and not reins and walking instead of loping.”

Wyle’s goal on the ranch is to give his children the same kind of horse and ranch experiences that he had growing up. “This teaches a tremendous amount of self-reliance and personal accomplishment and has fostered a wonderful family bond,” Wyle says.

All the animals on the Wyle ranch have come from rescue organizations such as Best Friends to Animals Sanctuary and Lil Orphan Hammies. Wyle is also a big supporter of the Return to Freedom American Wild Horse Sanctuary located in Northern Santa Barbara County, and he and his family attend the organization’s yearly Spirit of the Horse fundraiser. “I was profoundly impressed by founder Neda DeMayo’s passion for wild horses with no tangible benefit to her for the tireless work she does,” Wyle says. “It’s inspiring and makes me want to get involved with the sanctuary by helping to publicize her cause.”

Wyle’s own commitment to animals extends beyond the ranch. In 2009, he became a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

The last episode of ER aired in April 2009, and Wyle was back in his lab coat for the finale. While guest-starring on the show during the last few years, Wyle gained action hero cred in the TNT network movie trilogy The Librarian, portraying Flynn Carsen, a librarian who turns into an adventurer when he finds a mystical realm beneath the New York City public library. He called upon his horseback riding skills while filming the second Librarian movie, Return to King Solomon’s Mines.

“Any time you do riding in a movie the wranglers ask you if you know how to ride,” he says. “When I said ‘yes’ they gave me a riding test in both the arena and on trails to see how I handled a horse. I guess I did well enough that the wrangler swapped out an old, trusty horse and put me on a just-broken colt that he was grooming to replace that solid and well-trained one. When I watched the movie I shuddered as I had the brakes on this horse during all my riding scenes. He was a rocket and it was all I could do to sit in the saddle and keep the horse in the frame.”

The opening scene of the movie was an homage to John Ford’s westerns. “Even though we were shooting in Africa, the location scout found a great spot to double for Monument Valley,” Wyle says. “Making my escape from the villains, I jumped on a horse while they hopped into dune buggies and onto motorcycles, giving chase and throwing explosives at me all the way until we went off the cliff. I did all the riding as well as swimming my horse in the river, but needless to say, jumping off the cliff was created by the special effects team.”

Toward the end of his tenure on ER, Wyle was cast in the Oliver Stone-directed film W, about the life of President George W. Bush, playing Secretary of Commerce Don Evans. Continuing to explore different genres and characters, he is now the lead in a new TNT television series created by Steven Spielberg titled Among Us. Wyle plays Tom Mason, a former academic professor and father of three given the responsibility of heading up a group of survivors trying to save the human race.

Wyle first met Spielberg more than 15 years ago when he was cast on ER. Spielberg was one of the early producers, and although he was not deeply involved with the show, Wyle worked with him tangentially. “It is a privilege to be starting a second series with Noah,” Spielberg told The Hollywood Reporter. “The first one didn’t do too badly.”

Spielberg has been incredibly hands-on throughout the entire process of creating the new series‚ designing the aliens with graphic artists, storyboarding the sequences, leading the casting sessions to make sure he got just the right mix of actors, and coming to the set on the more difficult days of shooting to lend his support and vision.

“The shoot itself was very physical and arduous, but after some fine-tuning the pilot is firing on all pistons,” Wyle says. In the science fiction drama, aliens take over planet Earth after they wipe out most of the human population. “We are literally thrown back into the Dark Ages and have to scramble for our very existence. The story jumps in six months after the occupation took place, and we are deep into survival mode.”

Wyle has had a great relationship over the last decade with TNT. His first venture with the network was playing the high-tech whiz Steve Jobs in the critically acclaimed movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, about the early days of the computer industry. Next came the popular Librarian trilogy for the network, which includes Quest for the Spear, Return to King Solomon’s Mines, and The Curse of the Judas Chalice and took Wyle filming on three continents.

After the trilogy concluded, Wyle decided to step back a bit from a career that had been going full-steam for a decade and a half. But his self-induced hiatus was short-lived. “I got this wonderful script sent to me from Michael Wright, executive vice president and head of programming at TNT,” Wyle says. “Robert Rodat, who wrote Saving Private Ryan and has a long history with Steven [Spielberg], wrote the pilot.”

Even though Wyle was a bit reluctant to jump back into television, he liked the fact that the network produces only 10 episodes a season and that it was a genre he hadn’t worked in before. “What attracted me initially to this project was the human element,” he says. “It is the classic ‘what if’ scenario. What if tomorrow aliens landed on this planet and they weren’t interested in being friends and began to exterminate the human race? All our creature comforts become obsolete. There are no cell phones, no computers, no electricity, and cars don’t work. How would you survive? How would you defend yourself?”

While Wyle is not horseback in his latest role, he dreams about starring in a “straight-up, classic” western. He cites Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, and Gary Cooper as three of his favorite film cowboys, and is quick to list The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Rio Bravo, and High Noon as three of his favorite westerns. His current picks? Unforgiven and Silverado.

Looking at Wyle in boots and jeans leading CC across the ranch by the reins, it’s easy to see him being cast in a new classic western. And he’s ready for the role. After all, the only thing more comfortable than scrubs might be a pair of saddle-worn jeans. Wyle agrees: “I can’t think of anything better than getting dressed up in Western attire and going to work every day.”

 

Issue: April 2010

Filed under: Art-Entertainment, Film, TV