The trustworthy face that tricked an FBI pro
AS a baby-faced undercover FBI operative, Eric O'Neill, at the time just 27, duped America's most notorious double agent, Robert Hanssen, a paranoid egomaniac and sexual deviant who kept a stash of automatic weapons in his trunk.
By comparison, Hollywood's menagerie of control freaks was child's play. Pitch meetings didn't really challenge him, he said, because espionage and movie-making demand a similar skill set: nerves of steel, preternatural charm and a high pain threshold.
"You've got to be a really good actor -- put on a mask and never let it slip," said the now 33-year-old O'Neill, referencing his FBI undercover work and not the three-day movie junket he'd just survived. "It just turned out I was good at it."
So good, in fact, that within two years of Hanssen's summer 2001 guilty plea, O'Neill had won over Universal Pictures chair Stacey Snider (she's a "huge fan" of the FBI, said O'Neill) and had negotiated a movie deal -- without an agent. These days, when he's not negotiating U.S. Department of Defense contracts as a Washington, D.C., attorney, O'Neill is working on a TV pilot about a team of undercover field operatives for the CW.
"Breach," starring Ryan Phillippe as O'Neill and Chris Cooper as Hanssen, recounts the two months O'Neill spent acting as an assistant to Hanssen, one of the FBI's top agents, who had by then been compromised by the Russians. O'Neill shared a windowless office with the man, all the while reporting his every move to a massive investigative team. O'Neill's job was to help catch Hanssen in the act of sharing U.S. secrets.
"There were 500 agents working this case at its peak," said "Breach" writer-director Billy Ray. "There was only one who was locked in a room with the guy all day. And that was Eric."
O'Neill, like all the agents on the case, was initially ordered to keep quiet about it, telling only family and friends, at least until the FBI went public with its version of events. It just so happened, though, that O'Neill's brother David was an actor and aspiring screenwriter living in Los Angeles, trying to hit it big. So they started planning their Hollywood strategy days after Hanssen's takedown. Months later, after Hanssen pleaded guilty, freeing O'Neill from having to testify, he got the clearance to sell his story. David approached screenwriter Bill Rotko and together with Rotko's partner, Adam Mazer, they developed a book proposal, thinking the screenplay could come after it published.
