1 of 3 | Titus Welliver (L) and J.K. Simmons star in “Westies,” airing Sundays. Photo courtesy of MGM+
Lost, Sons of Anarchy and Bosch alum Titus Welliver says Glenn Keenan, the New York cop he plays in the new period drama, Westies, is caught between a rock and hard place as the FBI and the Irish mob both try to use him for their own purposes.
Loyalty can get twisted when there's a deal on the table. Tread carefully. A new episode of #TheWesties is now streaming on #MGMplus. pic.twitter.com/Z4z0Frm5ue— MGM+ (@mgmplus) July 26, 2026
“He’s just a very juicy character because he’s neither good nor bad. I would never stigmatize a character by making them either/or, but you find a character who is lost, who’s completely trying to navigate life without a compass that he once had, but he’s living in this arrested state of development,” Welliver, 64, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
“It’s almost like he’s waiting for his life really to end, because his existence is kind of a nonexistence,” he explained. “Then he’s suddenly pulled and thrust into this Gambino squad that he does not want any part of and, yet, he doesn’t have a choice. So, it’s fun stuff to play.”
The series, which is set in the Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen in the 1980s, airs new episodes on MGM+ Sundays.
J.K. Simmons plays Irish mob boss Eamon Sweeney, leader of the show’s titular crime syndicate for which Keenan’s estranged son Danny (Aidan Wojtak-Hissong) works.
The show kicks off with Sweeney trying to broker a deal with the Westies’ Italian rivals, the Gambino crime family, so they can share the territory where the Javits Center is being built.
Jessica Frances Dukes plays Birdie Polk, the FBI special agent in charge of the task force created to take down John Gotti’s organization.
Welliver said Keenan can’t leave town and start over somewhere else to avoid being caught between the different fractions in the city he grew up in.
“He’s a deeply provincial guy and he’s been completely estranged from his son since the death of his wife and, suddenly, the things line up, because Polk shows him a photograph of his son talking to Eddie Breen (Vincent Walsh), who is Eamon Sweeney’s lieutenant and that sort of lights a fire in him,” Welliver said.
“It’s not like he says, ‘Well, it’s time for me to show up and be a dad.’ More than anything, he just wants to get in front of it and try to navigate his son because I think, ultimately, you find a character who is so filled with self-loathing and self-hatred that he doesn’t care about himself and it’s not him seeking redemption,” the actor added.
“He just wants to try to move his son out because it’s over for Glenn. His life is over.”
Welliver said he thinks the 1980s was a harder time to be in law-enforcement because so many investigative tools weren’t yet available, which makes for a compelling “time capsule” of a show.
“You didn’t have computers. You didn’t have the Internet,” he noted.
“It was real ‘shoe leather police work and it was also at a time where, particularly with the crack cocaine epidemic, that, suddenly, you had all these little sawed-off gangsters,” he added.
“The money that was being generated, these guys had access to bazookas and AK-47s and machine guns,” Welliver said. “It was a very, very unpredictable and dangerous time.”
