Wheaton Grad Callie Thorne Makes Good on Her Pact

For Wheaton College graduate Callie Thorne, one large dramatic door is opening just as another is about to close.

Thorne, who played Sheila Keefe on "Rescue Me" from the time the show premiered on FX in 2004, will appear on the final episode of the series on Sept. 7. At that point, "Rescue Me" will have run for seven seasons and 93 episodes.

For Thorne, however, the beginning of the end is also the end of the beginning. She began appearing in a new series on the USA network, "Necessary Roughness," which had its first broadcast on June 29. There she plays Dr. Danielle "Dani" Santino, a tough divorcee and single mother who works as a therapist for a pro football team to make ends meet.

Thorne told Newton Patch that some of her earliest lessons about drama were learned at . "When I got there, there wasn't a very large theater department," Thorne recalled. "I was treated very well. I was coddled there because there weren't a lot of people studying." At Wheaton, Thorne said, she learned how to look at a role and break it down to understand the character. "I learned to dissect it and I love the process. I still apply all the stuff I learned at Wheaton to help me take care of the character," she said.

Also during her Wheaton years, she became determined to be an actor. "I knew that, no matter what happened, I was going to move to New York in 1991 when I graduated," she said. "That was the pact I made with anyone who would look me in the eye. I was going to New York and give myself three years to see what happens."

Her career got on track in the 1990s with small roles in TV and film and playing Det. Laura Ballard for two seasons on NBC's "Homicide: Life on the Street." In the 2000s, though, Thorne's career took off. She was a frequent guest star on TV crime series filmed on the East coast. And then came "Rescue Me," which follows veteran firefighter Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary) as he struggles with vexing personal issues and demons post 9/11.

When asked what she will miss about playing Sheila, the widow of Tommy's cousin, Thorne said, "I'll miss everything. I'll miss terribly how these guys set up an environment where Sheila could, within the same scene, have the emotional hard core stuff going on and then, within that scene, I would then have the opportunity to figure out how make it work into something comedic by the end of it. That's why being with Denis Leary is like being in a master class.

"I will miss that very much. And I will miss the improv that we do. It was set up like a playground in that way and that had a lot to do with FX. It's different with other networks. Your job is to come in and bring personality to what is written and that itself is really good hard work. But I will miss the improv."

There is a different process to producing episodes of "Necessary Roughness," she said.

"I have to learn to shut my trap," she said. "I'm used to saying, 'Wouldn't it be funny if...' and on "Necessary Roughness" they say, 'Well, yeah, that would be funny but that's not what the story line is,' which I respect. " Thorne said it took about a month and a half for her to make the transition to the different style.

Her new series is based on the true story of a female psychologist for the New York Jets and, yes, Thorne found a connection between her old and new roles. "I'm playing a therapist who is sort of trying to help people like Sheila," she said.