Kyle Chandler has been a familiar face in Hollywood for over 30 years. True Pure Country superfans will recognize him as Buddy Jackson, a road crew member who poses as "Dusty" Chandler (George Strait), but Chandler is best known for playing Coach Eric Taylor for five seasons of the NBC series Friday Night Lights (which earned him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series) and bringing the phrase "Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose" into our lives.
To hear the actor tell it, his Friday Night Lights role isn't all that different from his real life. True, he doesn't coach high school football and he's not married to Tami Taylor (Connie Britton)— he's been married to Kathryn Chandler since 1995 — but, like Eric Taylor, Chandler lives in the Lone Star State, residing at a 33-acre ranch outside of Austin, Texas, and enjoys imparting Coach Taylor wisdom on his daughters.
During an interview on The Kelly Clarkson Show, Chandler admitted that he frequently shares lines from the show with his daughters, Sawyer and Sydney, when dishing out fatherly advice.
"When we were shooting that show...I heard more than a few times 'Dad, just stop. I saw the episode,'" Chandler said.
Since 2007, the University of Georgia alum has lived in Texas, where his family owns several miniature donkeys and dogs.
"Every time I come home, we have another dog," Chandler told Men's Journal. "It's cool. You build a fire on the property and just sit out there, and the dogs stay with you. It's a good feeling."
Born in Buffalo, New York, Chandler grew up in Illinois and moved to a small farm in Georgia at the age of 11.
Chandler told Men's Journal that losing his father at the age of 14 impacted his desire for a family of his own.
"I always wanted a family of my own since the time my pop died," Chandler told the magazine.
Chandler is an active member of the Texas community where he lives. He even worked as a firefighter between his starring roles in Friday Night Lights and Bloodline.
Chandler got his start on the ABC drama Homefront before rising to fame as the star of Early Edition, a CBS show about Gary Hobson, a man who mysteriously receives the Chicago Sun Times the day before it's actually published. He also guest-starred on Grey's Anatomy as Dylan Young. In addition to his television work, he's starred in several films, including Mulholland Falls, King Kong, Argo, The Spectacular Now, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Zero Dark Thirty, Super 8, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Manchester By the Sea, Carol, Game Night and Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street.
Chandler can currently be seen in the Netflix film The Midnight Sky opposite his Catch 22 co-star George Clooney.
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