In a new 20-CD audio release, one of the most infamous characters in world literature is played by former teen heartthrob Luke Perry. “Whomever I kiss, he is the one. Seize him and lead him away safely,” the former Dylan McKay instructs the high priest’s goons in the Garden of Gethsemane before approaching Jesus. “Rabbi, Rabbi.” Smack.
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In addition to producing commercials, soundtracks and radio dramas, Cerny is an actor and writer who has built a successful, if not exactly lionized, career in stage productions, industrial films, and a handful of features—but mostly in radio and TV commercials, notably playing the silent Cheer detergent man. He’s also the voice of the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Raid bugs. “I’ve gotten killed thousands of times,” he says.
But Cerny has more than just a dramatic feel for what it takes to make a convincing Satan, or a Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Cerny’s parents, who raised him in Cicero, weren’t religious, but in sixth grade he embarked on a precocious spiritual quest and became a Lutheran.
Cerny’s unit was never called up, and he returned home and picked up his theater studies as a graduate student at Northwestern. After graduating he won a place in Second City’s touring company and sought out additional acting work wherever he could find it. In a book for young actors he published in 2002, he explains that he could have made it through lean times as a cabdriver or a waiter but instead devoted all his time and money to his own acting “business,” which meant taking on jobs that might not seem glamorous but paid the bills.
Working off a script written by two Catholic priests, Cerny directed some 24,000 takes with about 120 actors, most of them Chicagoans. “What happens in church is you hear the same story for years and years and years, and people read it the same way and it becomes rote,” says Cerny. “What we did is we went back, we looked at that model and destroyed it. Even things like the Lord’s Prayer—imagine the first time it was done. It isn’t done at a temple that a congregation does together. It is done asking for real things.”
