After Hanover, Woody moved to New York City and worked as an understudy in Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues on Broadway — the kind of early career experience that places a young actor in the proximity of professional theater without yet giving him the stage. He also worked as an extra and in small roles on film and television. The years between college graduation and the Cheers casting were the years that most working actors know: the years of near misses and small opportunities and the constant question of whether the career was real or not.
During those same years, his father was being tried, convicted, and sentenced. Woody had discovered his father’s criminal career by radio in 1981 — hearing coverage of the case while Charles was under investigation — and had confirmed the connection with his mother. By his own account, he had little contact with his father during childhood and learned the specific shape of that father’s actual life only as an adult.
He chose, upon learning it, not to disappear. He made contact. He visited. He engaged with the legal process, eventually spending what he described as approximately two million dollars in legal fees trying to win his father a new trial. He stood in at his father’s proxy wedding in 1987, representing Charles at a ceremony with a woman Charles had met in prison, in a gesture that could be interpreted as loyalty or as a son trying to do what a father couldn’t do for himself.
The choice to maintain the relationship rather than to disavow it is not an endorsement of what his father had done. Woody has never said he believed it was right for his father to kill people. What he has said is that he found the proceedings against his father unacceptable as a matter of due process — that the trial was infected by prejudicial pretrial publicity, that the trial judge had himself been one of Wood’s pallbearers, that the defense was drastically under-resourced relative to the prosecution’s investment. He has called the conviction “a travesty.” He has said he was “just being a son trying to help his dad.”