“I’m a bit of a weirdo,” Harold Perrineau said. “My wife says it all the time: ‘You don’t realize how much of a weirdo you are.’ I’m the guy talking to himself thinking about a thing.”
He didn’t seem like a weirdo in a recent phone interview. Driven, perhaps, or even a little obsessed — like a lot of successful actors.
Maybe weirdness was on his mind because he was calling to talk about his starring role in a new horror series, “From,” that, no question, is weird. Imagine “Our Town” if George Romero got his hands on it.
In the series, which premieres Sunday on Epix, Perrineau plays Boyd Stevens, a no-nonsense sheriff in charge of keeping his town safe from the undead visitors who stalk the streets after sundown. Bearing neighborly grins, these ghouls plead to be let inside people’s homes. It’s not a great idea to let them in — unless you want to be disemboweled, like the little girl and her mother in the series’s unnerving first minutes.
“They slowly meander toward you,” said Perrineau, 58, a father of three daughters who lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Brittany. “That’s what makes them so scary.”
For Perrineau, it’s familiar territory: a return to form for an actor whose best-known roles have been similarly desperate men in dire situations, including Augustus Hill, the paraplegic narrator of the experimental HBO prison drama “Oz” (1997-2003), and Michael Dawson, the tragic father and frustrated artist in the landmark ABC series “Lost” (2004-10). As in “Lost,” a show with which “From” shares two executive producers, Perrineau’s character finds himself trapped with an eclectic ensemble of characters, harassed by supernatural forces.
To hear Perrineau describe it, the role once again lets him, as an actor and a human, ask: “What would I do?”
But it is also the next step along a path that has been anything but obvious, a lead TV role — his first since “Oz” — that is worlds away from the stage, where Perrineau, a talented singer and dancer, cut his teeth. And it’s a long way from where he started.
Perrineau grew up in Cypress Hills, a neighborhood in the historically tough East New York section of Brooklyn. He caught the performing arts bug early. He loved dancing, he said, and at Erasmus Hall High School, in Flatbush, he studied violin because he was “too short to play the bass well.”
He was no fan of horror; as a child in “those hoods in the ’70s,” he said, “there’s no money and no funding, and people grow up on welfare and there are guns and drugs.”
As he put it: “I had enough bad images in my head.”
Still, the pull of the performing arts was strong — he had found his kind of weirdos — so Perrineau said goodbye to Brooklyn to study musical theater at Shenandoah University, in Northern Virginia. But when his classmates found out he had left New York to prepare for a career onstage — “Are you crazy?” he remembers them asking — they pushed him to rethink his choice. After a year-and-a-half, he went back to New York to study dance on a scholarship for the Ailey School and took acting classes.
Perrineau got a break in 1986 when he was cast as a dancer on the NBC series “Fame.” Acclaim followed in the 1990s for his roles on “Oz” and on the big screen, including as a deliciously glammy Mercutio in Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” (1996) and in the lighthearted rom-com “Best Man” (1999), which spawned a 2013 sequel. (A Peacock series featuring the original cast, including Perrineau, is planned for later this year.)
In 2004, “Lost” took his career and “cranked it up to another level,” as he put it understatedly. (Translation: “I couldn’t walk down the street without being recognized.”) His character was killed in Season 4 and returned for the sixth and final season, an arc that Perrineau has said disappointed him at the time. It was also a development that, in retrospect, probably helped him to avoid being defined by a single role thereafter.
“Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on when you ask me, I left ‘Lost’ pretty early on, so people don’t only see me as Michael,” he said. “That helped me do as many other things as I could.”
To name a few, he played a drug kingpin in FX’s “Sons of Anarchy,” a judge in the Amazon series “Goliath” and an angel in the NBC series “Constantine.” His stage career has continued, too: Six years ago, he made his Broadway acting debut in a revival of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.”
But Perrineau said it was a dress — dresses, really — that fine tuned his sense of self. As the drag queen Rhea Ranged in the Netflix comedy “Dumplin’,” Perrineau said, he learned “this thing about: ‘Girl, you have to be you because there’s no other way to be.’”
“Being in a dress,” he said, “was the first time I felt I understood how to understand my Weirdo Harold.”
Whoever Weirdo Harold is, he has fans. As “From” begins, one person tuning in will be the actress Niecy Nash. Perrineau played Dean, the autistic brother of Nash’s Desna, the South Florida nail salon owner and money-launderer in the TNT dramedy “Claws.”
Nash said Perrineau was “at the top of the list in terms of favorite scene partners” on “Claws,” which recently ended its four-season run. Outside of work, she said, the guy’s a mensch.
“He is a good time, and an amazing father, and has one of the most infectious laughs I’ve ever heard,” she said. “Him leading the charge against zombies is something I’m watching.”
Like the road leading out of town in “From” — which leads supernaturally right back into town — Perrineau’s path away from “Lost” has, in a sense, come full circle. Created by John Griffin, “From” is another show about perdition, in every sense, a slow-burn horror story about trapped strangers with shadowy histories and motives.
If that sounds a bit familiar, it’s little wonder. The show’s executive producers include Jack Bender and Jeff Pinkner, two of the executive producers of “Lost,” the ne plus ultra of trapped-strangers stories. But listen up, vexed “Lost” fans: The 10-episode first season of “From” will have “a very contained arc,” Pinkner has said.
“That’s what they said about ‘Lost,’ too,” Perrineau said with a laugh.
Those arcs, however, trace very different lines. Where “Lost” began with a plane crash and only later — to the frustration of many fans — tipped into the otherworldly, “From” is supernatural horror from the start, driven by two central mysteries: Why do these creatures return every night? And why can’t the townspeople escape? Add extra layers of premium-cable carnage, and horror fans should be tickled.
Bender, in a recent video call, said that having worked with Perrineau on “Lost,” he knew the actor to be a “wonderful maypole” whose warmth drew his castmates close. Perrineau “carries with him this deep well of integrity without broadcasting it,” Pinkner added, going on to describe the actor’s qualities as “gravitas and grace and intensity and heartbreak.”
Griffin, the creator, who was on the video call with Bender and Pinkner, recalled a day on the “From” set when one of Perrineau’s lines wasn’t landing; after some back-and-forth on what to do next, Griffin let go.
“So then I was like, ‘Harold, just do what feels right,’” Griffin said. “I walked away then watched him on the monitor, and sure enough he opened his mouth and magic came out.”
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