UGO: It seems like Ronnie [David Rees Snell] is finally getting some action on the show, including hooking up with Paula Garces.

SHAWN: Paula is great and I won't say if she hooks up with anyone. Ronnie is a character we've all loved for a while but story wise he has had to take a little bit of back seat. But now with Lem's death and the Strike Team inflamed he's really got an opportunity to step up in this current season. I think we'll be seeing more of Ronnie than we have in the past.

With the networks taking a day off, we found stars outside of the Ritz. Go figure. Here's what we saw:

*FX hosted a screening of "The Shield." Absent from the panel afterward was Kenny Johnson, the actor who played Lem.

Lem died in the show's season finale and is no longer on the cop drama.

But his old castmates gave him plenty of shoutouts as he sat looking on from the audience. In fact, Johnson and Walton Goggins, who plays Shane, kept making googly eyes at each other and Goggins called Johnson his best friend like 50 times.

And then Chiklis said he and Johnson and Walton are all best friends while poor David Rees Snell, who plays Ronnie, sat at the end of the panel looking dejected.

He must not be in the Chiklis best-friend circle.

...One result of O’Loughlin joining the cast: David Rees Snell was asked to shave his trademark beard (there was a concern, he said, that he and the Aussie actor looked a bit alike). So Snell shaved his beard about the middle of Season 6. “After five seasons, where was the payoff? Where was the big scene” about Ronnie shaving his beard, Snell said with a laugh. After five seasons of the beard, Snell said, Ronnie’s new cleanshaven look was barely mentioned in passing by other characters..

It occurred to me on Tuesday morning that Shawn Ryan had bumped into me at the CBS party and told me, "You need to do a story about David." I had written about every other "Shield" actor and writer with a Kansas City connection -- Jay Karnes, Liz Craft, Sarah Fain -- but had overlooked David Rees Snell. Hey, I'm only one man!

Better late than never.

The Kansas City Star“The Shield” has been very good to former KU student David Rees Snell, who plays strike team member Ronnie Gardocki. In fact, just this week he landed an audition for an upcoming TV pilot because of those two words on his resume.

“ ‘The Shield’ is very, very well thought of by people in Los Angeles,” he said by phone this week. “Even people who have not seen ‘The Shield’ think it’s great.”
Snell’s long road to TV started in the 1980s in Lawrence, where he was a roommate of Jay Karnes’. Both eventually moved to L.A. Karnes found some success and directed one of Snell’s plays, but Snell found little but frustration.

“I came to Hollywood right out of college and found I could not get anyone to see me,” Snell recalled. “You’d do a play and literally no one would come see it.
“Finally I decided the whole city was a pyramid scheme. The actors were at the bottom of the pyramid and their paltry dollars (paid to agents, etc.) ran the whole industry.”

Snell gave up and moved back to Wichita, where a tip from Karnes got him into industrial films for Payless Cashways, Western Auto and others. Most of that work was in Kansas City, and after putting tons of miles on his car commuting, he just moved here in 1992.

The next six years were spent doing a lot of everything: corporate movies, stage acting, even a bit part as a reporter in “Truman,” the HBO movie filmed here.
“I made a rookie mistake in that,” he said with another laugh. “My big scene, we all crowded around the house to gain a concession quote. I was supposed to make my way through this throng of reporters. But they won’t let me through.

“Now, the savvy TV actor just gives up. But the theater actor makes it happen. So — I just shouted my line. I wasn’t even on camera. In fact I wasn’t even on microphone. And that was the scene they used.”

When “Truman” was screened here, Snell said, “I took a date I didn’t know especially well. I didn’t tell her I was in the movie, and it’s a good thing because I wasn’t.”

By the time he was ready to give L.A. a try again, an ally from the mystery-audience-theater days came through. Shawn Ryan, who had staged a Snell play and was a roommate of Karnes’, had gotten a contract from FX to write a police drama. Ryan hired Karnes for “The Shield” cast, and gave Snell a call about the pilot.
“Shawn said, ‘We’d like you to be in the pilot, but we didn’t get you enough money to have a speaking part.’ I thought, ‘I dunno. I’m the fourth guy on the strike team. What will be left for me?’ But if I hadn’t (said yes), I wouldn’t have a house now.”

This is the fifth season of “The Shield,” but the first in which Snell’s name appears in the opening credits. Better late than never, but Snell knows that time is winding down for the show. Ryan is also running “The Unit,” which has posted decent numbers for CBS. He has indicated publicly that he is unsure whether to continue “The Shield” for a sixth season.

Meantime, there’s Season 5 1/2 to look forward to. Those 10 episodes begin filming next month and could be on FX as early as this fall. This summer Snell has a part on a Hallmark Channel movie, “Desolation Canyon,” in which he gets to ride horses with Stacy Keach and Patrick Duffy.
On the home front, he and wife Melanie have an 18-month-old child. He hasn’t lost sight of the city that gave him work when no one in L.A. would even give him the time.

“I was channel flipping the other night and I caught a glimpse of the drugstore on Westport and Main, was it the Sav-On? The Osco, that’s right. It was a shot looking north, and I said, hey, that’s Kansas City! So I watched the show. It was an episode of ‘Cops.’ ”

All his life, David Snell has wanted to be an actor. So there came the day when he was sitting at his home in Los Angeles, and he was looking through the script of “The Shield,” his show. And he was noticing that his character, Detective Ronnie Gardocki, had quite a few lines and scenes.

“I thought, ‘This is a pretty good episode for me,’ ” Dave says.

Dave grew up in Wichita, and once he realized that he would never become a professional athlete, acting seemed the most glamorous life he could imagine. He studied theater at the University of Kansas. He went to Los Angeles, full of hope, and couldn’t even get an agent to see him, much less a director or producer. Dave came back to Kansas City, played at the Unicorn Theatre, Missouri Repertory Theatre, Coterie Theatre. He was in Shakespeare in the Park. He loved the work. He gave Los Angeles another try.

A mustache

He grew a mustache that his wife hated and auditioned for a part on “The Shield,” a show about urban cops who, of course, aren’t above breaking the law. They liked Dave. They liked the mustache. To this day, Dave is not sure which quality got him the part. Over the next four years Dave has been able to trace his progress on the show by his credit line. You wouldn’t believe how important the credit line is — actors actually negotiate to have the word “and” added to their credit (“and David Doyle as Bosley”).

First, Dave was an “extra.”

Then, he was “co-star.”

Then, he moved up to “guest star.”

“I always thought ‘co-star’ was bigger than ‘guest star’,” I told him.

“Maybe it is,” he says. “But that’s not what they told me.”

Then, it was, “Also starring David Rees Snell.”

And now, finally, he is a fully credited cast member.

“I never got to be a special guest star,” he says with some regret.

Along the way, Dave worked. That’s another thing people don’t know — acting, especially being on a series like “The Shield,” is a blue-collar business. It isn’t caviar in the trailers and cheeky poses for the publicity men. Dave often gets up for a 5:15 actor call. He spends a half-hour in makeup. He reads the scene, then reads it again, then acts it out, then acts it out again, then leaves while all the lighting is set up. When he gets back, he has to act out the scene again and again until it’s right. And that’s just one scene. Dave tends to be in 30 or 40 scenes a week. He usually puts in 12-hour days.

He’s not complaining. It’s a pretty good life. His wife, Melanie Myers, also plays on the show sometimes. They have a 1-year-old daughter. And Dave is a working actor, just like he dreamed. He just worked in a Western that will play on the Hallmark Channel. He has done a few short films. And he’s still Ronnie Gardocki every week on “The Shield.” This makes his fifth season with the show.

It’s hard because Ronnie Gardocki is not exactly a major character. For a long time, the mustache was Ronnie’s most apparent quality. Now, he wears a beard. It’s not much to go on. The “Gardockifans” Web site explains Ronnie’s personality this way:

“He is a member of the strike team, headed by Vic Mackey. Not much is known about Ronnie other than he is single (to all known knowledge), he thinks that the ladies love his mustache, and that he is allergic to cats.”

This is on his FAN site.

“When I was acting in the theater, I always knew the whole story,” Dave says. “So, even if I was playing a small part, I would think, ‘OK, how can I help tell this story?’ But with Ronnie, it’s weird, because I don’t know the story. I might think of Ronnie as, say, a former football player who got hurt and decided to become a cop. But then, the next week, the writers might tell me, ‘No, Ronnie’s a former ballet dancer.’”

So anyway, Dave is reading the script this one day and his character, Detective Ronnie Gardocki, has just a bunch of lines. He keeps on reading, and the script twists a bit, takes us into Vic Mackey’s apartment — Vic is the main character on the show. Vic is making out with some beautiful woman. Then Vic smells something. Gas. He stands up, rushes to the kitchen and there’s Ronnie, lying on the floor, having been beaten and grilled on the stove.

“I jumped out of my chair,” Dave says. “And I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m going to die. What’s going on here? Am I going to die?’ I called up the producer and said, ‘Am I going to die? Am I going to die?’ ”

Nope. Just maimed and disfigured.

Which means more time in makeup, maybe, but for a working actor, it’s worth it.

To reach Joe Posnanski, call (816) 234-4361 or e-mail to [email protected].