CHICAGO — Jeff Perry is a familiar face to longtime Shondaland viewers, from his role as the political mover and shaker Cyrus Beene on ABC’s “Scandal” to a far kindlier role as a nurturing colleague and “Scriberia” journalist in Netflix’s “Inventing Anna.”
His career, of course, began decades earlier at the Steppenwolf, the Chicago theater company he founded with Terry Kinney and Gary Sinise. When they first launched the theater, did Perry anticipate it would be around nearly half a century later? No, he said. “Better paying work has, in America’s relatively short history, always been the death knell for the longevity of such experiments.”
Many of the ensemble’s original members — which also includes Joan Allen, John Malkovich and Laurie Metcalf (to whom Perry was once married) — have found considerable success in Hollywood. “And I thought, well, this was crazy fun while it lasted,” said Perry. “But instead, something in the Midwestern water, in the Midwestern DNA of this particular group, in the sheer amusement and satisfaction that we already felt, drew back the Lauries, the Johns, the Garys.”
And it’s continued to draw back Perry as well, who stars in Steppenwolf’s production of Anton Chekhov’s “Seagull” through mid-June.
When asked about a worst moment in his career, Perry didn’t pick just one. Instead, he offered a cascading array of humiliations that come with the profession.
My worst moment …
“Here’s the first. I’m in eighth grade and this is a story about falling in love with acting that has a strange beginning. Our English teacher did a short adaptation of Herman Wouk’s novel ‘City Boy.’ And I had a role that had a lovely monologue, and in rehearsals, it just felt so fun. I didn’t know at all what I was doing, but to pretend to be this other person and to say these words? It was the first time I thought I might have a place in school. And I did notice that there was attention from classmates and I had never felt the glare of such acceptance (laughs).
“So we perform it in the school auditorium at Edgewood Middle School in Highland Park. I make my entrance, I say a few words. And then I can’t remember the rest of my lines (laughs). I think I blurted out something akin to the final line of my little appearance and got myself offstage and broke down into tears.
“When I look back, what is that — 52 years ago or something? — I think: That was your beginning, man (laughs). And that didn’t put you off. Well, that’s interesting.
“OK, big failure to start.
“I get out to Los Angeles — this is many years later, I’m in my early 30s — and I’ve kind of delayed what most of my colleagues have already dealt with, which is how to audition or how to survive and get a job alone. Because I had been in this theater circus, where we were self-determined — we decided what we wanted to do, did it obsessively and were completely like pigs in (mud). And there was a support system. We were absolutely dependent on each other, like an inbred family (laughs).
“And I go to some audition at Sony or Culver Studios, and I’m auditioning for an executive of a famous Hollywood lineage who shall not be named. It was probably for a little TV thing. I do my memorized bit and I swear that this executive ate a full sandwich and took two phone calls during my 30 or 45 seconds of the audition. And I went away disoriented and enraged.
“Jumping back a little bit in chronology to the first three years at Steppenwolf in the Highland Park Immaculate Conception Church school basement — a theater of 88 seats that we created and lived in for three obsessive years — we were doing Harold Pinter’s ‘The Lover’ directed by Terry Kinney. Laurie Metcalf and I are in this two-hander and I think she would agree, we had no idea what this middle-aged, mysterious, sexual role-playing couple was up to.
“And I was so terrified that I thought — for the first and the last time — hey, what if I take these nerves down with some scotch stolen from my dad’s liquor cabinet? So I tried that — and that made it worse. As a company, we smoked a lot of marijuana, but I wasn’t much of a drinker. But I was feeling so terrified because I hadn’t, up to that point, felt the degree of absolute inadequacy and uncomfortableness that I did in that play. So I did a couple of belts. I think I did more than a couple. And that didn’t go well. It just made it slow. More stupid. More missed lines. More terrified, if that was possible. Just a nightmare. I think Laurie knew pretty quickly. She probably laughed.
“So, no more drinking before going on stage.”
Battling nerves is something all actors have to contend with. How does Perry work through that?
“There were things about ‘Seagull’ and (director Yasen Peyankov’s) insights about what the story needed and what he needed from me. He was specifically saying, ‘Jeff, you are a mad dog of syncopation and eccentricity — but I need this guy to be really statement-oriented and straight and not a bunch of hills and valleys.’ And it was such an interesting challenge after all these years. Comparisons are odious, but it would be like asking Christopher Walken to not be eccentric. It’s kind of an essence of my personality.
“So that process over these last few weeks caused some old feelings of nerves as I was embracing what I thought was beautiful and proper direction from my director. I just knew in my gut that he was right and I’m going to do my darndest to do it. And the nerves kicked in at different moments. But then what would kick in was: I’m too (freaking) tired and old to get really nervous.
“When you know you’ve got less runway in front of you than behind you, for me anyway, it’s like: Fear or terror or nerves, all those things feel tiresomely ego-driven — like the fear of what will people think of me? If that isn’t replaced by your gratitude that you’re breathing and you’re getting to do something that you love, then you’re a (jerk). That’s what I told myself. And it’s worked.
“I have one more story. John Malkovich directed a play by Christopher Hampton called ‘Savages.’ And it was Brits in their colonial fervor somewhere in South America trying to reform an Indigenous tribe. So: White, North Shore and Central and Southern Illinois actors are putting on brown body paint and ridiculous wigs. This was sometime between 1980 and 1983.
“Somebody had to miss a performance and I was a replacement. So I got in the brown paint and put on the ridiculous wig. And there’s a ceremony where there’s wrestling and you grab each other’s wrists and you try to make the other person go off balance. So I’m wrestling with this guy who had the grip of a shark’s jaw and was throwing me around and my stupid wig flew off into the audience. And I know I continued on in this pathetic denial-based behavior of: I didn’t have a wig, no wig just flew off. The show must go on.
“But the shame. And the humor. The combination was pretty funny.”
The takeaway …
“I think anyone who performs live — I’m sure this is true of people who play sports or play music in bands — just knows that this is part of the territory. It’s just an ever-present possibility that you’re going to have humiliating moments. And the survival of those moments is what’s key. Oh, I got up the next day. Nobody actually divorced me (laughs). You didn’t die. That’s the bottom line: You didn’t die.
“The mystery of why performers go, ‘OK, not only did I not die, I want to do it again’? I don’t know why that is. But I do know that ‘you didn’t die’ helps you get through dozens of times when you’re on the edge of what you considered failure. Eh, I got through worse.
“In fact, some weird part of your wiring as a performer is: Wow, I’m a little bit of a freak in the human parade, because for most humans this is a fight or flight moment — they don’t go into emotional trauma and vulnerability with such gleeful anticipation as performers do (laughs). And what actors find is that you actually enjoy the exposure and vulnerability.”
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