One M*A*S*H Actor Completely Tanked His Audition
The 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital wouldn't have been the same without Father Mulcahy (William Christopher). The army chaplain gave "M*A*S*H" a sense of soulfulness, and helped the show talk about serious topics that its jokester characters might otherwise be too zany to pull off without his thoughtful input. Father Mulcahy was also just nice. As played by Christopher, the Catholic priest was non-judgemental and supportive, willing to meet each character where they lived in terms of religiosity — and he was kind of just a charming goofball.
Mulcahy started "M*A*S*H" as a recurring character, but by season 5 he was a series regular. Across the show's run, he delivered some of its most memorable moments (soberly relaying a graphic story about the battlefield in "The Interview," for example) and sometimes got substantial plotlines of his own: helping to run a local orphanage, having a crisis of faith when he felt his spiritual work was less helpful than the doctors' physical work, and eventually losing his hearing in the show's series finale.
Father Mulcahy was tougher to cast than expected
The supporting character was invaluable to the massively popular sitcom, but it turns out, Christopher almost didn't make it onto the series. Initially, the show cast an actor named George Morgan to play the priest role, but he only appeared in the pilot episode. He was replaced with Christopher beginning with episode two, but according to an interview later-season showrunner Burt Metcalfe did with The Hollywood Reporter in 2018, the actor totally blew his initial audition. "We made the pilot with a different Father Mulcahy," Metcalfe recalled. "He was the only performer [series creator Larry Gelbart] wanted to change."
"Bill was my great white hope," Metcalfe shared. "He blew the audition, though. Larry wrote in a specific rhythm and if you don't adhere to it, you destroy the humor." Apparently, though, Christopher still possessed something that Gelbart wanted for the character, who would be playing a relative straight man in contrast to the wilder, hedonistic members of the 4077th.
William Christopher got a second chance to earn his role
"Larry said he wanted someone with natural idiosyncrasies," Christopher's wife Barbara told THR in the same interview (the actor himself passed away in 2016). "That was Bill. An interviewer told me once that Bill 'is a man who likes to take an idea, and surround it with words until it surrenders.'" Christopher's Mulcahy was idiosyncratic for sure, and it became a joke in the series that other characters would on occasion impersonate his manner of speaking.
In the end, Metcalfe was able to get Christopher a second shot at the job. "Luckily, I managed to get him another audition," he recalled in the THR retrospective. This time around, the actor made the cut, and would go on to play the priest for all eleven seasons of the long-running show. In Suzy Kalter's "The Complete Book of M*A*S*H," Christopher wrote mostly positively of his time on the show, recalling that he learned Catholic rituals and Latin prayers for the show, read up on the chaplain corps, and visited priests at a church down the street from the Fox lot to get a feel for the austere profession. In the end, though, he wrote, "I found that priests are very human and that I should avoid doing any stereotyping of a saintly nature. I wanted to play away from making Father Mulcahy too innocent. He acted as a kind of balance, a sane balance, to the wackiness of the doctors."
Christopher played Father Mulcahy for a whopping 213 episodes of "M*A*S*H," and in the end, he was proud of his work. "We did a lot of serious shows and broke some ground," he wrote in Kalter's book, "That's what makes it a classic."