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.”
