Don Worley is in the middle of six films at once.
That’s not a figure of speech. Right now, as you read this, he has a faith-based crime thriller going into principal photography in April with Angie Harmon. He has a comedy with Jon Lovitz, Chris Kattan, and Tara Reid in post-production. He has a micro-budget horror shooting in Louisiana in May. He has something filming in Toronto this month. He has a vertical short-form project — 90-second episodes designed specifically for a phone screen — shooting in April. And he has a contained psychological thriller, A Time for Sunset, already streaming on Apple TV and Amazon Prime, quietly accumulating critical attention while the industry hasn’t quite figured out where to put him yet.
Most people would call making one of those a good year. Don is doing all of them at once, out of a production company he built himself, financing them in ways that don’t require anyone in Hollywood to approve of him first.
“I don’t have a brick and mortar studio,” he told me. “Second Chance is basically me.”
That’s a deliberately modest framing from a man who’s actually built something. The company is called Second Chance Pictures — named for his second chance at an entertainment career after two decades as one of the most successful mass-tort trial attorneys in the country. But the “second chance” narrative, as tidy as it is for a press release, slightly undersells what’s actually happening. Don Worley isn’t a lawyer who decided to try acting. He was an actor and comedian first — trained in theatre at the University of Texas, performing stand-up nationally, appearing in films like D.O.A. with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan — before he pivoted into law and built something massive. The entertainment industry was never the second chapter. In some ways, it was always the first.
“Stop talking about what you want to do and start doing it,” he said. “No one cares about your ‘someday’ plan.”
The law firm he built — McDonald Worley — grew into one of the largest personal injury and mass tort practices in the country. He doesn't dwell on the money, but the architecture of how Second Chance Pictures operates gives you the shape of it: state film incentives, pre-sales, brand integrations through a company he owns called BrandIn Entertainment, and occasionally his own capital. He describes bringing in investors as “doing them a favor” by including them — a frame that only works if you’re the kind of person who’s spent years closing rooms full of skeptical people for a living.
What he misses about law, it turns out, isn’t the strategy or the money. It’s standing in front of a jury. “I had to give up personally trying cases,” he said. “That was my favorite part of practicing law and the main reason I was drawn to the profession as an actor.” The real courtroom work goes to other attorneys now — ones he acknowledges are, in his words, “actually even better than me at trying cases.”
That’s a telling admission from a man who doesn’t traffic in false modesty. It tells you something about how seriously he takes craft.
“I had several people try to force me to take the film outside of the hotel room. I stayed with the vision and now have a finished film I am proud of.”
The Tempering, the faith-based thriller in pre-production, is the project that reveals the most about where Don actually is. The film follows a female detective who’s lost her faith — skeptical, hard-edged, pulled into a case involving missing children. He did the rewrite himself, and the decision to make the lead a woman was largely to accommodate casting Angie Harmon, who carries a decade of detective-role equity from Rizzoli & Isles. But the emotional core of the story — a person estranged from their faith, circling back to it — isn’t just a script beat for him.
“Leaving faith and coming back to it was part of my own personal journey,” he said. “Part of the reason for leaving the church were ‘ministers’ I had bad experiences with.” He channeled that specific bitterness into his satirical YouTube character Pastor Shepherd — a televangelist parody that went viral, spawned a feature film with Danny Trejo (streaming now on all major platforms), and continues as a short-form TikTok series at @shepherdprayerhour and @shepherd.caught. It’s a quietly interesting way to process a genuine wound: build a comedy character out of the people who hurt you, get millions of views, make a movie, then eventually make a serious film about finding your way back to the thing they almost took from you.
The vertical project is where Don starts to look less like an independent filmmaker and more like someone reading the industry three moves ahead.
Hollywood is currently in a gold rush around short-form vertical content — 90-second-to-two-minute scripted dramas designed to be watched portrait-mode on a phone. The format exploded in China and has since grown into an $8 billion global industry. Fox Entertainment has committed to producing more than 200 vertical titles. SAG-AFTRA now has a dedicated verticals agreement. The format that everyone in a studio meeting spent two years dismissing as a TikTok fad is now the thing those same executives are scrambling to architect. Don is already doing it, from Texas, without a greenlight from anyone.
“Different in that they’re 90-second episodes and not a 90-minute film,” he said. “But story still comes first.” His verticals are cast with recognizable faces — Tara Reid, Vivica Fox, Alexis Knapp — alongside social media influencers who bring their own audiences to the table. It’s a hybrid model the major studios are still trying to work out on whiteboards. He’s already on set.
A Time for Sunset — which won Best Thriller at the Culver City Film Festival and landed a 9/10 from Film Threat — is the most instructive film in his catalogue so far. It’s essentially 90 minutes of Don alone in a hotel room, carrying the whole thing as a hitman on one last job who starts receiving calls from someone who knows exactly what he’s doing. He made it against advice. “I had several people try to force me to take the film outside of the hotel room,” he said. “I stayed with the vision and now have a finished film I am proud of.”
What it hasn’t done yet is make money. He’s honest about that in a way most people in his position wouldn’t be. “It hasn’t really taken off financially yet,” he told me. “But it has received wonderful reviews from professional critics. It taught me that people really want to watch good content. Not just a splashy expensive production with movie stars in it.”
That lesson is the entire operating philosophy of Second Chance Pictures. And it sits against what is, genuinely, the central irony of Don’s life right now: his son Max — who appeared in A Time for Sunset because the character needed to look like his actual son — just graduated from Texas A&M with a degree in finance and now works in real estate. His older son just finished clerking for a federal judge after graduating from Harvard Law School. Neither of them is interested in acting.
Don Worley left the legal world his sons are walking into. His sons walked straight into the world he left. And he’s standing somewhere in the middle, making six films at once, waiting for the phone to ring from an agent who will finally take his call.
“Getting past agents and managers when I am an unknown in Hollywood has proven very difficult,” he said. “Even if it’s a great script, you can’t attach great actors if their agent or manager won’t let them read it because he doesn’t know who Don Worley is.”
The Tempering may change that. Angie Harmon’s name on a poster opens doors that five well-reviewed films couldn’t. But Don Worley has spent thirty years in rooms where the door was supposedly closed. The courtroom taught him one thing above everything else: if you prepare the story, you control the room.
He’s been preparing for a long time.
Second Chance Pictures’ current projects include The Tempering (in pre-production), ManDate (post-production), and A Time for Sunset, streaming now on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and Tubi. Power of Attorney: Don Worley streams on Amazon Prime and Tubi.
