In Season 3, before Lois Lane and way before the introduction of Jimmy Olsen (or his brother Henry), Smallville introduced a major character from Clark Kent’s future – Perry White – in an episode titled “Perry.” Playing Perry was the legendary actor Michael McKean whose impressive resume includes This Is Spinal Tap, Laverne & Shirley, Saturday Night Live, A Mighty Wind, Better Call Saul and more. Written by Mark Verheiden and directed by Jeannot Szwarc, “Perry” was one of the most memorable episodes of the entire series and McKean later returned to the show alongside his real-life wife, Annette O’Toole, in the Season 9 episode “Hostage” and his voice was heard in the Daily Planet newsroom in the series finale.
When conducting our #Smallville20 interview with Annette O’Toole for KryptonSite, we were treated to a surprise opportunity to ask McKean some questions about his time as the legendary character who loves to bellow “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” So, for our continued coverage marking Smallville’s 20th anniversary, let’s see what he had to say!
“They actually they talked about me playing some other part, something involved with the high school, not the principal, I don’t know,” he revealed. “But then I don’t really exactly know how it came about [to play Perry]. They wanted to get me up there with Annette, and I thought it would be fun to work together, because it always it is. And then they just said ‘how would you like to play Perry White?’ And I said, ‘Dude, yeah!’ And that’s as much as I can remember.”
“There was not a lot of haggling,” McKean recalled, adding the trivia that he had already played Perry White on Saturday Night Live.
Was there anything new that McKean wanted to bring to his incarnation of Perry White?
“I liked the idea of Perry White before he was the boss, when he was just kind of a ‘failure pile’ as my friend Patton Oswalt likes to refer to people,” Michael explained. “He was a pile of failure, and in this episode, it actually ends with him kind of on the upswing. I thought it was a nice ‘pre-story,’ you know what I mean? I kind of found myself in the middle of a backstory, and it was a lot of fun.”
Come back to KryptonSite for more #Smallville20 coverage as we continue well beyond the anniversary and into next week!