Jerry O'Connell Briefly Went to Law School After a Canceled TV Show: 'My Career's Over'
- - Jerry O'Connell Briefly Went to Law School After a Canceled TV Show: 'My Career's Over'
Virginia ChamleeFebruary 14, 2026 at 3:24 AM
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Jerry O'Connell
ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty
Jerry O'Connell is opening up about being a "law school dropout"
In a new interview, he shares that he enrolled in night school when acting "got very slow"
Eventually though, he left to go back to acting, joking that it paid more
Jerry O’Connell is sharing that his brief stint at law school came as a result of fearing that his career in entertainment was "over."
Speaking on the Friday, Feb. 13 episode of the Drama Queens podcast with host Sophia Bush, O'Connell, 51, shared that he enrolled at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles in 2009 during a brief hiatus from acting.
"I was acting, and then it got very slow for me acting," he said, adding of his wife Rebecca Romijn: "My wife was very busy. We just had two children. We have twin daughters, and they were about one, and I applied to night law school — an accredited law school in Los Angeles called Southwestern Law."
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Rebecca Romijn (L) and Jerry O'Connell
STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty
O'Connell continued: "I had always wanted to go to grad school, and I was like, 'Oh, well, while my wife is working, I'll apply to grad school.' "
After debating about what field he wanted to study, the longtime actor settled on law.
"So I took the LSATs, and I applied to two night law schools in Los Angeles, and I got into one. And I went to night law school for a year," he added.
At the time, he said, he was at somewhat of a turning point in his career.
"I had a TV show that was canceled abruptly and I was like, 'That's it. My career's done,'" he recalled. "And so then about a year passed, and I started to audition for TV shows again, and I got a TV show for CBS, ironically enough, playing a defense attorney."
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The CBS legal drama — The Defenders — starred O'Connell as a Las Vegas criminal defense attorney alongside Jim Belushi. "I think they hired me — a lot of it had to do with, they were amazed that I was in law school," he said of the show, which lasted one season."But I'm a law school dropout. I dropped out because I realized you can make way more money playing a lawyer on television than actually being a lawyer. But, you know, I might go back," O'Connell said, adding: "School is really fun for me."
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
