Sean McNamara (Nip/Tuck)

Infobox character | name = Sean McNamara


real_name = Sean McNamara
portrayer = Dylan Walsh
creator = Ryan Murphy
species =
gender = Male
first = Pilot "(episode 1.01)"
last =
last_cause =
age =
occupation = Plastic Surgeon
title =
alias =
family = Thomas McNamara (father)
Colleen McNamara (mother)
spouse = Julia McNamara (divorced; first time)
Julia McNamara (divorced; second time)
children = Matt McNamara (legal son, with Julia)
Annie McNamara (daughter, with Julia)
Conor McNamara (son, with Julia)
relatives = Jenna McNamara (granddaughter, via Matt)
footnotes =

Dr. Sean McNamara is a fictional character on FX Networks' drama series "Nip/Tuck", portrayed by Dylan Walsh. His character opens the show with the trademark catchphrase, "Tell me what you don't like about yourself." His partner, Christian Troy, has been his best friend since college, which is partly why they went into business together. Sean is portrayed as the more skilled, yet more troubled surgeon, who apparently specializes in craniofacial surgery. He is often plagued by family distresses involving his wife (ex-wife, then remarried and ex-wife again), Julia, and "son", Matt. The two also have a daughter, Annie, and a newborn son named Conor.

Character history

Sean formerly ran the McNamara/Troy plastic surgery clinic in Miami with his best friend, Christian Troy. He is nearing middle age and trying to come to terms with the choices he has made in his life; he believes that he went into plastic surgery to help repair the bodies of the deformed and the mutilated, but became sidetracked in performing vanity procedures. When the show begins, he is considering going into "pro bono" work [Nip/Tuck 1.01] .

Sean and Julia have had many ups and downs in their marriage, and their relationship is slowly falling apart. At one point, Sean has an affair with one of his patients - Megan O'Hara, a breast cancer survivor who is separated from her husband. The affair continues until Sean confesses it to Matt and tries to break it off, but he feels obliged to Megan when her cancer returns. She decides she would rather commit suicide than go through chemotherapy, and asks Sean to help her go peacefully. Julia accompanies Sean to Megan's funeral where she realizes why he is so upset about her death.

Sean and Julia work hard to try to salvage their marriage. In the middle of the second season, Julia learns that Matt is, in fact, Christian's biological son (the result of a one-night stand just prior to Julia and Sean's wedding). Though Sean eventually forgives Christian, he finds it difficult to do so for Julia, and the two separate.

Around this time, a masked serial killer begins terrorizing Miami, raping and mutilating fashion models. Referred to as "The Carver" by the media, he leaves deep cuts on both sides of his victims' mouths, resembling a smile. When McNamara/Troy begin performing "pro bono" surgery on his victims, the enraged killer targets Sean. Sean is eventually attacked by The Carver in his home, but is more fortunate than most of his victims; he receives only a single cut on his right cheek and is not raped. Quentin Costa, a surgeon from Atlanta, is called in to help Christian fix Sean's face.

After Christian becomes a Carver victim himself, he finds it difficult to continue working. To pick up the slack, Sean offers Quentin a limited partnership, which he accepts. Christian is initially against the partnership, but eventually agrees to work with Quentin.

During this time, Sean's life becomes even more chaotic. Julia files divorce papers and begins her own spa, and Christian is arrested in connection with the Carver rapes (and one murder). The Carver attacks while Christian is in jail, and Christian is set free. The incident greatly hurts business at McNamara/Troy, and Sean begins to question the cosmetic surgery business again. After an incident in which the doctors attempted to perform plastic surgery on an elderly woman in unfit condition for such a procedure, Sean quits the practice and joins the Witness Protection Program. He only performed one operation on a son and mother, with whom he then began to have a relationship. Finally choosing between leaving his old life behind and beginning a completely new one, he returns to the practice and ignites a bitter rivalry with Quentin, who has since begun dating his ex-wife.

The rivalry ends with Quentin buying out the remainder of his contract and going to work at Julia's spa. Julia eventually fires Quentin, and discovers soon after that she is pregnant. Sean and Christian initially assume the child is Quentin's. However, Quentin, not knowing that Julia is pregnant, admits to Christian that the two never had sex. The child is now assumed to be Sean's, the result of a night the two spent together after their divorce.

Sean's relationship with Matt could be salvageable, since Matt asked him to do "pro bono" work on Cherry Peck, a transgendered person he beat up. Shortly after doing so, The Carver launched two more attacks, this time on a sorority house, and on Sean's rival, Quentin Costa. Sean agreed to fix Quentin after a heart-breaking speech, but he and Christian pay dearly for it, because The Carver sneaks up and drugs Sean, and then takes off the mask, revealing himself as none other than Quentin Costa. He then straps both Sean and Christian to the operating tables, plays mind games with them, and then cuts off one of Sean's fingers. Christian decides to sacrifice himself, or more specifically, his left hand to save Sean. Before that happens, Quentin is shot from behind by Kit McGraw, a police officer who had a brief relationship with Christian. However, she is also Quentin's sister and had been helping him commit the attacks.

A microsurgeon saves Sean's finger. After giving up the property deed to his house to Julia, she decides to add his name to it, saying she'll only move back in if he's still living there. He agrees and they move in together again but their relationship is put to a strain after he discovers that his son is going to be born handicapped with ectrodactyly, commonly known as lobster claw syndrome. Furthermore, he later has sex with a potential nanny named Monica Wilder, but afterwards decided not to hire her after feeling guilty of cheating on Julia once again. Although he has no feelings for Monica and broke whatever they had off after she returned to him, she has no intentions of leaving Sean and will prove to be a threat to Sean and Julia's tenuous reunion.

Despite not hiring Monica, she continues to involve herself in Sean's life by filling in as Conor's nanny when his regular nanny is hospitalized with food poisoning. After repeatedly telling her to leave, Monica confronts Sean at work and asks him to look at a possible infection to her nipple stemming from continuously attempting to breastfeed Conor. Sean contemplates killing Monica to prevent her from telling Julia of their affair, but is ultimately unable to and tells her to leave and that she should see a psychologist. Enraged, Monica tells Sean that she is going to tell the police that he raped her and thus destroy their marriage. Sean hurries after Monica, trying to talk some sense into her when she is killed in a freak accident when a bus hits her while crossing the road.

When it got closer to the day of Conor's hand surgery, Sean faces several obstacles. First, Julia became more hesitant in even having the surgery done and with Marlowe's (Conor's nurse) encouragement, she refused to sign the consent forms. Additionally, Sean became more conscious of Conor's hands as a young boy makes fun of his condition, prompting him to insult the child's own physical appearance and punching the boy's father. Eventually, Sean settled everything with the father and realized that he was merely projecting his repressed anger from his own childhood, revealing to Julia that he was born with a cleft lip, which made him an object of ridicule (it should also be noted that his mother's decision to repair it secretly with Sean's college fund ultimately led to his father leaving the family). After discovering this, Julia agreed to the surgery and Sean was now more at ease with Conor's chance of living a normal life. However, Conor's infancy meant that both hands could not be operated on at the same time. Sean operated on only one of Conor's hands before Julia decided to cancel the second surgery and take Annie and Conor with her to New York, leaving Sean behind.

Sean has sessions with psychologist Faith Wolper without Christian knowing. She tells him that Christian has had dreams about him. Sean tells Christian, and their relationship goes back to normal [Nip/Tuck 4.12] . Sean has sold his share of his partnership to Christian and Michelle claiming he needs to know if he can live without Christian. He moves to Los Angeles and gets a new job. However, Christian soon joins him [Nip/Tuck 4.15] .

However life isn't easy in LA and they spend their first 2 months without any clients. Desperate they join a show as consults and guest-stars. While Christian is cut out due to bad hair, Sean's appearance allows him to be recognized on the streets and have some clients come [Nip/Tuck 5.01] . Going on with the show he begins a relationship with a fellow actress but they have some trouble when she reveals to be a former fat girl and asks him for an abdominoplasty, making her flee in Christian's arms although they later make up [Nip/Tuck 5.02] . He then meets and becomes obsessed with Olivia's daughter Eden [Nip/Tuck 5.03] . He then proposes to his new girlfriend Kate [Nip/Tuck 5.04] but when they try to spice up their sex lives they realize they are not made for each other [Nip/Tuck 5.05] . When Eden comes back from rehab, he kisses her [Nip/Tuck 5.06] . As their relationship goes further, Eden admits it was just "A get it out of your system screw." finding him too old. He gets advices on how to stay young without surgery form Aidan Stone and than goes to his party, where he ignores Eden to get her to want him. As they have sex he has an adverse reaction to MDMA (ecstasy), which lands him in a hospital where Christian and Julia learn about the affair, disgusting Julia [Nip/Tuck 5.07] .

Sean's life is further complicated by his agent Colleen, who comes off as overly attached to Sean. When a rival agent shows interest in representing Sean, Colleen lures him to her apartment and kills him by force feeding him stuffing from teddy bears which she makes. Sean eventually learns that Colleen isn't a licensed agent, and breaks off ties with her despite her numerous attempts to contact him. He files a restraining order with her, but she still insists on being around him. Seeking revenge on Sean, she places the body of the dead agent in his room and apparently flees the country. Later, when Sean is at the office working on Annie who was recently involved in a car crash, Colleen sneaks into the office and repeatedly stabs Sean in the back leaving him on his back coughing in a pool of his own blood with Colleen staring down at him.

Future

In the flashforwards of episode 'Conor McNamara, 2026' when Julia sees Sean she asks how his second wife is doing indicating Sean eventually remarries. Sean, however, tells her not to ask him about his personal life giving no further details. Conor, aged 20, decides to go through with the surgery on his other hand with Matt as his primary surgeon and Sean in the operating room assisting.

References