Back when ”Beverly Hills, 90210” was known only to a handful of postal workers and the name Dylan was mostly associated with poetry and lyrics, Luke Perry was getting kicked out of his high school production of ”South Pacific.”
Seems Perry was asked to pose for publicity pictures and took the occasion to flash a well-known hand gesture more germane, perhaps, to the trucking industry than to Rodgers & Hammerstein.
”It`s not like the cover of Rolling Stone; you can`t just stand there flipping off,” recalled Perry, now known to millions of adoring teens as Dylan McKay, the world`s best boyfriend, on Fox`s ”Beverly Hills, 90210.”
”They took the picture, they saw it and they asked me to leave. So I did.”
Perry once again was asked to pose for publicity recently. And while he has refined his gestures much as he has polished his craft in the intervening years, he made it abundantly clear during an at-times uneasy give-and-take with reporters in Marina del Rey that you can take the rebel out of the play, but you can`t take the play out of the rebel.
He may have just been fooling around. He may have just been tired. Whatever. It didn`t go well. Perry came off as a bit of a prima donna (”No comment on Madonna”), a bit too big for his sideburns. He impressed no one.
One reporter innocuously suggested Perry was the next James Dean (”At one point or another, everybody gets called the new James Dean”). And Perry`s mood didn`t improve when another wanted to know how he would compare himself with Dean (”Same: We`re both from the Midwest, and we`ve both crashed a few cars. Different: He`s dead, I`m not and I don`t plan on it.”).
It was when someone suggested he might want to remake some of Dean`s films, he went ballistic. ”You`re lucky they don`t let me curse at these things!” he said of the gathering.
Perry is either 26 or 28, depending on whom you ask. He wouldn`t say. In either case, a lot has happened to him in a short time. He came to Los Angeles from a small town near Cleveland a few years ago, straight out of high school, to become an actor.
After bit parts on the soaps ”Loving” and ”Another World,” he landed the job on ”Beverly Hills, 90210.”
The best thing about it was that it was steady work. It was also a multidimensional character, and in Hollywood, that`s rare. He didn`t know what he was getting into.
”Doesn`t say role model in my contract,” Perry said. ”I looked at every page. On no page does it say role model. I was hired as an actor. The role model thing gets imposed on you by someone else. I don`t think that`s fair.”
”The pressure of being under the magnifying glass, it goes with the job,” Perry said. ”People are going to know who you are. You`re going to lose some privacy. It`s hard to keep a grasp on it.”
