Coy Luther "Luke" Perry III (born October 11, 1966) is an American actor. Perry starred as Dylan McKay on the TV series Beverly Hills, 90210, a role he played from 1990–1995, and then from 1998–2000. Much publicity was garnered over the fact that even though he was playing a sixteen-year-old when 90210 began, Perry was actually in his mid-twenties at the time. Perry returned to 90210 in 1998 (this time billed as a permanent "Special Guest Star") and remained with the series until its conclusion in 2000.
Perry was born in Mansfield, Ohio and raised in Fredericktown, Ohio, where he was the school mascot, the Fredericktown High School Freddie. His mother, Ann Bennett, was a homemaker, and his father, Coy Luther Perry, Jr., a steelworker. Luke Perry has revealed he likes to go home annually for the Fredericktown Tomato Show, an annual street fair.
Perry stated on The B.S. Report Podcast that he moved to Los Angeles shortly after high school to pursue acting as he didn't have any opportunities to do so in Ohio. He worked as a paver and lived in various cities including Huntington Beach, Long Beach, Downey, and Paramount.
In an interview with Whoopi Goldberg in the 1990s, Perry said he auditioned for 215 acting jobs in New York before finally scoring a TV commercial. After appearing in the music video "Be Chrool To Your Scuel" for the band Twisted Sister alongside Alice Cooper, Perry's earliest roles were in the daytime soap operas Loving (1987–1988) and Another World (1988–1989).
Following this, he then won the role of brooding millionaire's son Dylan McKay on Fox's appealing teen drama, Beverly Hills, 90210. He had auditioned for the role of Steve Sanders, a role that went to actor Ian Ziering before being cast as Dylan McKay. While starring on 90210, Perry then won a supporting role in the original film version of the Joss Whedon's Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1992). Perry had already become a very popular teen idol in the early 1990s. Perry also starred in Terminal Bliss in 1992.
Perry starred as Lane Frost in 8 Seconds in 1994. In an attempt to find more mature roles, he decided to leave Beverly Hills, 90210 in 1995. In the same year, he took a part in the Italian movie Vacanze di Natale '95, playing himself. Although he announced that 90210 was behind him, his departure would eventually turn out to be for only three years. During that time, Perry starred in the independent film Normal Life opposite Ashley Judd, starred in the TV science fiction movie Invasion (1997), a Rodney King drama Riot (1997) and also had a small role in Luc Besson's science fiction adventure film The Fifth Element (1997). Even though Perry had left 90210 in 1995, he returned in 1998 for financial reasons. Perry starred in the 1999 film Storm. He then went on to star in a 2002 television movie called The Triangle.
From 2001 to 2002, he starred in the HBO prison drama Oz, in which he performed a full frontal nude scene, as Reverend Jeremiah Cloutier. From 2002 to 2004, he starred in the post-apocalyptic TV series Jeremiah. In 2005 Perry was rumored to be in Day of the Dead 2: Contagium, but did not appear to be in the film. In 2006, Perry co-starred in the ensemble drama series Windfall, about a group of friends who win the lottery. The series ran for 13 episodes during the summer of 2006 on NBC. In 2007, he landed the role of Tommy "Santa" Santorelli on the film The Sandlot: Heading Home and in the 2008 western A Gunfighter's Pledge.
Perry appeared in the HBO series John from Cincinnati, which premiered on June 10, 2007, and ran for 10 episodes, with the series finale airing on August 12, 2007.
Perry also stars in the Swedish film Äntligen Midsommar (Finally Midsummer) which was released in the summer of 2009.
Perry said of his role on Beverly Hills, 90210 as bad boy Dylan McKay, "I'm going to be linked with him until I die, but that's actually just fine. I created Dylan McKay. He's mine," however he has revealed he will definitely not be reprising his role on the spin-off. "When you're in the professional acting business," he begins, "you have to look into all these offers and I don't mean anything bad about it but creatively it's something I have done before and I don't know how it will benefit me if I do it again." He finally revealed a major reason as to why he did not want to be part of this revival, citing the show's long-time producer Aaron Spelling. "The difference between CW bringing something back and Aaron Spelling doing something back is significant," he says. "And I cannot do it without Aaron." However, Shannen Doherty, Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling reprised their roles in the 2008 revival of the series.
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