So how DO you go from obnoxious reality TV stripper to IVF guru?
His boorish, boozy antics were the epitome of all that’s worst about voyeuristic TV shows: but now Marc O’Neill is a changed man...
had one shot at getting pregnant and you had put all your savings into it, would you trust the guy from Tallafornia who was running around in the nip with your life savings?
‘If you had asked me six months ago if I regretted it all, I would have said yes. But now I have this job in UCD, I’ve made my peace with it all. I’m aware of the irony of this job, but my profession is that I’m a chemist.’
In America, Marc found no such obstructions, as his sordid past was not an issue for prospective employers. ‘The first job interview I went for, I got the job,’ he says. ‘The second year, the same thing again. I nailed the interview and got the job because they didn’t know who the hell I was.
‘In America I used to work with muscular dystrophy and heart disease. Now I work with IVF. I love science and what I do and when you find something you are passionate about, it really helps you get up in the morning. I appreciate what I’m doing now because I feel I’ve earned it, whether I’m working with IVF or making drugs for people with cancer — which is where I ultimately want to end up. I’d like to do a Masters down the line and take it from there.’
Marc certainly doesn’t look back on his time on Big Brother and Tallafornia with rose-tinted glasses. He’s been forced to accept his choices and move on with his life. He sees it as part of his maturing process and, at 32, says he has finally grown up.
‘I always knew I had to change but batted it down the line,’ he says. ‘When I was in college and on drinking sessions with my mates I’d destroy my body with drink. I justified it as I was in college and young. In college, I did acting, Tallafornia and stripping. I really thought I was going to make it. In fourth year though, I had to do a thesis and started to fall in love with science.
‘I started to hold back on the partying, but Claire — who is now my girlfriend, but was back then my manager — applied for Big Brother on my behalf. At the time, Tallafornia fans hated me. The majority of people thought I was this huge a**hole because that was the character I was brought in to play.
‘I played that big personality and tried to do everything to the extreme — every time I saw a camera I would play up to it. I really believed if I was the most outrageous person on TV, people would love me. But it doesn’t work like that. You have to be marketable — and how are you going to market a guy who runs around a house naked causing trouble?’
In the beginning Marc did find his business was booming after he appeared on screen. ‘When I started off doing kiss-o-grams, I would get €150 and do maybe three on a Saturday night. I did Tallafornia and that turned to €250. But that was for six months and after that there was this huge decline and I was irrelevant.
‘So Claire saw Big Brother as a chance to get the real me out there. After Big Brother I was getting €700 a night for stripping — everyone loved me on it because I was more myself. I was still extravagant, but I was nicer. After six months that all fizzled away and I was no longer beneficially famous.
‘People see you driving a crap car and give you grief. Or they see you in a nightclub and can’t understand how you’re not a millionaire. Now I’m this guy who looks like someone on Big Brother and I play up to that. It makes for a happier life.’
The other life-changing event for Marc while he was in America was that he fell in love. His college friend who used to manage his stripping gigs, Claire Colleran, became his girlfriend and helped him down a different path — one he continues to walk today.
‘Claire was my friend for years and managed me in college,’ he says. ‘It was platonic, she was always there for me and looked after me. I spent those four years blind to what was in front of me, always chasing these superficial women, when this incredible girl was there all along.
‘America was a wake-up call for me. One night, we went for dinner and kissed on the way home and we’re together over a year. She’s managing a lab in San Francisco at the minute, so we’re doing the long-distance thing.’
This works for Marc for now and he hopes, in a year or so when Claire returns home to Ireland, they will move in together and maybe head west, where her family owns a large dairy farm.
‘I know what I want in life now and it’s not chasing fame,’ he says. ‘I’m happy with Claire, it’s steadied me and we have total trust in one another. I love her to bits.’
So is this a very modern-day morality tale, in which a young man’s shameless behaviour comes back to haunt him? Let us all hope that it is not that, but a modernday fairy story: and that in this case, as in the best fairytales, they will all live happily ever after.
‘I was getting €700 a night for stripping’ ‘I know what I want: I’m not chasing fame’
IT was, even by the gutter-level standards of the genre, a new low in Irish reality television. As six young wannabes returned to their Majorcan villa from a day at the beach, they bathered inconsequentailly about their plans for that evening. Walking out the patio doors to the pool, their swagger was halted as they were greeted with a rather big surprise.
Strutting out of the water was a tanned, unnaturally muscled, tattooed man. He was also unashamedly stark naked.
But this wasn’t a prank: the exhibitionist then nonchalantly announced that he was their new housemate. It was the first time Irish viewers had ever set eyes on Marc O’Neill — and it wouldn’t be the last.
Tallafornia — a reality TV show in which 24-hour cameras filmed the participants from the Dublin suburb of Tallaght living together, getting drunk together and, frequently, jumping into bed together — had already drawn criticism for its drunken and sexually-charged debauchery.
The show even prompted Senator David Norris to rail against it in the Seanad, arguing that the TV3 show encouraged its stars to ‘behave licentiously and compete to bring people home to bed them’. But Marc’s debut brought a new level of shock factor to the programme.
His emergence from the pool set the tone for the rest of his tenure. He wound up the others every chance he got, and at one point nearly came to blows with another cast member.
‘I was pretty much the alcoholic lunatic running around that never had clothes on,’ Marc said of his Tallafornia experience.
A couple of years later, he hit the reality TV jackpot when he swaggered into the Big Brother house, an arrogant smile plastered on his meticulously groomed face. One of his very first remarks was a crass quote about a female cast member’s breasts.
Not long after, when another woman was called by the production crew into the interview room, he loudly joked that she was being summoned for an STD test. She was incensed and threw her drink at him, before a protective male housemate squared up to the Dubliner to lecture him on manners.
Marc’s expletive-laden explosion onto the scene certainly succeeded in its objective: it infuriated the contestants, and producers gleefully zeroed in on the other men and women’s frantic, hushed lamentations about how much of a problem he was going to be. Whenever there was a chance to insult someone, Marc pounced, doing his best to insert as many crude sexual references as he could.
Fast forward two years and the man who stands in front of me is a very different one. He’s wearing a white lab coat and safety goggles, while his deep tan has faded to milk bottle white and his hair has been given a buzz cut. He is almost unrecognisable compared to the orange-hued character he once played on TV.
After half an hour spent in a lab at UCD’s Health Science Building with Marc, my mind is completely blown. With his energetic vim, the retired stripper explains that his new job is a far cry from his on-screen personality of a boorish, boozy lout, a role he played all too well.
He’s now part of a research group that’s focused on providing a molecular understanding of the factors affecting fertility. In short, he’s part of a team hoping to enhance the future of IVF treatment, specifically working on the potential to improve pregnancy rates following assisted reproduction.
‘We’re trying to give people the best chance of having a pregnancy,’ he explains, injecting a protein solution into a beaker. ‘In simplistic terms, if a woman is 35 years old and has six viable eggs left, we don’t know which one of them is going to give her the best chance of having a baby.
‘What we are trying to establish is a way of finding that out, without damaging the eggs. We are hopefully devising a way of finding out which egg will give you the maximum chance at a pregnancy.
‘That is what I am doing right now, research to find out if we can do that. If we can, we will significantly increase the chance of pregnancy, as well as significantly lower the cost of IVF down the line.’
And the new-look Marc O’Neill is not simply another eprsona for the TV cameras, either. Two years ago he graduated with honours in organic chemistry and molecular biology from Maynooth University. During his graduation ceremony he made the decision to hang up his thong and fake tanning loyalty card in favour of straightening up his life.
He went to the US on a two-year graduate visa and furthered his studies.
‘I’m not the same person because I don’t have to act any more,’ he says. ‘I changed the look, I knew the tan and the hair had to go. I tried to grow a beard as well, but I can’t grow a proper one. I covered up my tattoos with long-sleeved loose tops.
‘If I’m out and about now, people come up now and tell me I look like someone from Big Brother and I laugh and smile and leave it at that. I play it down as much as I can.’
Unsurprisingly, considering his onscreen antics, Marc struggled to find work in Ireland after he finished with Tallafornia. Job interviews became an arduous chore, that very often led to disappointment.
‘It was when I came back from America after two years working there that I realised the worst part of being in Tallafornia was being recognised in job interviews,’ he says. ‘The last job I had was in drug discovery, investigating drug metabolism and knowing how long a drug will stay in someone’s system.
‘I came back to Ireland when my visa ran out and I found this job that was perfect for me. I had all the relevant experience and I went to the interview and I nailed it. I just sat there and I knew I had killed it.
‘Halfway through, the guy interviewing me started smiling and smirking and at the end he just asked, “are you that fella from Tallafornia?” I sheepishly said yes. If I lied they could just Google me. He didn’t say anything bad to me, but I didn’t get the job. I nailed that interview, but didn’t get it.
‘The same thing happened again with the next interview and I’d get that look. One would turn to another in the interview panel and give a nudge and that was it. So I lost out on some really good jobs as a result.
‘That was the worst part of it all, so to anyone out there who is thinking about applying to these shows, you won’t be taken seriously for a career job if you go on them.
‘And I get it. I work in IVF. If you