Sean McNamara (Nip/Tuck)

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Sean McNamara
First appearance	Pilot (episode 1.01)
Information
Gender	Male
Age	42
Occupation	Plastic Surgeon
Relationships	Julia McNamara (away)
Children	Matt McNamara Annie McNamara Conor McNamara
Portrayed by	Dylan Walsh
Created by	Ryan Murphy

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 specialises in craniofacial surgery. He is often plagued by family distresses involving his wife (formally ex-wife before they remarried), Julia, and son, Matt. The two also have a daughter, Annie, and a newborn son named Conor.

[edit] Character history

Sean fomerly 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.

Sean and Julia have had many ups and downs in their marriage, but 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. At the end of the first 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, who he then began having a relationship with. Finally choosing between leaving his old life behind and getting a new one completely, 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.

His 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 a bit, 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 — and is also Quentin's sister, who had been helping him commit the murders.

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. Futhermore, 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 steming from continuously breastfeeding 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 was met with several obstacles. For one thing, 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, in which he eventually revealed 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 agrees to the surgery and Sean is now more at ease with Conor's chance of living a normal life. However, Conor's infancy meant that both hands couldn't have been 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 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. 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 and it appears they will be setting up a new practice in Hollywood.

[edit] Future

In the flashforwards of episode 'Conor McNamara, 2026' when Julia sees Sean she asks how his 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.