By Luaine Lee, McClatchy-Tribune News Service –
PASADENA, Calif. — When actor Harold Perrineau was 16 years old he found himself in a hallway confronted by a policeman with a drawn gun. When he turned to run, his life changed forever.
“I grew up in these Projects and sometimes the cops would harass us. We were punk kids hanging out where we shouldn’t probably … There was this one cop who was particularly aggressive. And we were all standing in the Projects just talking, I don’t think we were doing anything. Before we knew it, somebody screamed, ‘Cop.’ And when somebody screams ‘Cop’ you’re supposed to take off,” he says.
“I was at the end of the hallway and the doorway was in the middle. When they screamed, ‘Cop’ I started to run. And when I started to run I saw him pull his gun, and as it (the bullet) was coming by my head I thought, ‘Oh, I’m about to get shot in the back of the head’ and I ran up the stairs. That day changed a whole lot of things for me,” he says.
“OK, I got it. You don’t have to tell me twice. The hanging out, the cool. Got it. You don’t have to mention it again. I got the lesson.”
The actor, who’s costarred in shows like “Lost,” “Romeo + Juliet,” “Sons of Anarchy” and TBS’ new musical sitcom, “Wedding Band,” premiering Saturday, says that lesson has sustained him ever since.
He and his wife, Brittany, have two daughters, 18 and 4, and are expecting a son in late March. He has always worked consistently, whether it was in the field of acting or something else.
During his struggling “actor” years he sold Time-Life books, was a soda jerk, a delivery boy, a file clerk, and was hired to count bonds in a basement on Wall Street.
“I did a show at a theme park, Kings Dominion in Virginia, where you did eight shows a day,” he recalls over coffee in a diner here.
“It was a full musical revue. Every once in awhile I look back at pictures of me in my ‘Oklahoma’ costume dancing, it just makes me laugh,” he says.
A variety of odd-jobs helped, he thinks. “It helped me as a person because I’m trying to create people — lives. If I don’t have a life and don’t know any other people — I’m not that gifted. It also makes me appreciate when I do get a job. It makes me work really, really hard. There are people who work really hard to make the kind of money I make sometimes. I figure if I get these opportunities, why would I waste it by not working as hard as I can? … I’ve worked hard, but I truly feel lucky because there are lots of people who work hard who are not as lucky as I am.”
Many viewers first spied Perrineau as the wheel-chair bound narrator on the gritty “Oz.” But there were years of struggle before that, including two years at Shenandoah Conservatory and two years as a dancer at the Alvin Ailey School of Dance. “Acting was the thing I wanted to do, I just didn’t know how to get there.
“So I started using that skill (dancing) thinking it would get me into the door to be an actor, but it only got me in to be a dancer, “ he laughs.
“You have to be naïve to believe I can do this and still be an actor. For the first year or so I got in trouble from the head of the dance school because I was always going to auditions … But I still wanted to be an actor, so I stopped dancing. And I was waiting tables and bartending and went back to acting school. I was 28, but I looked 14,” he laughs. “It was a lucky break.”
Six years ago he was touring with a play, their last stop was Los Angeles. He and Brittany decided to stay so he could try out for pilot season. “So I went through all of pilot season and didn’t get a job,” he says.
“And right before the show was closing, I decided to go to an audition and I auditioned for ‘Lost’ and moved to Hawaii for two years. My character was going to come back but we didn’t know when. So that’s when we moved to Los Angeles, and that’s when my second child was born.”
Though his parents were never married they reared him together and his mother always supported his idea of becoming an actor. She died three years ago. That’s still hard, says Perrineau, 49, with a sigh.
“My mom passed, my daughter was just born, and suddenly you realize all the stupid things you thought about, fought about, were really, really mad about, couldn’t do. Suddenly she’s gone. Like the vessel that brought you here is suddenly not here.”
