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Parks and Recreation star Jay Jackson says he still gets fans shouting out Perd Hapley lines on the street, a decade after the sitcom aired its finale.
"You get tourists saying, 'Hey, it's Perd!'" and other general exclamations, Jackson tells EW. But the most common line he gets surprises him.
"One I hear a lot, and it's the most requested line I get on Cameo, which is really odd," Jackson explains, "is where I say, 'It's a heartwarming story, but it's just not believable. Which is why I give it one-and-a-half stars.'"
Parks and Recreationis still beloved after all these years. So beloved, in fact, that Jay Jackson, who portrayed the daffy, fan-favorite broadcaster Perd Hapley, still has fans shout out their favorite lines in passing. And what he hears most often is surprising.
"It depends on where I go. It depends, like if it's Disneyland or if it's Hollywood and Highland, I get different ones," Jackson tellsEntertainment Weekly. "You get tourists saying, 'Hey, it's Perd!' Or, 'Ya Herd? With Perd!'" Jackson explains, citing one of Hapley's many silly programs on the sitcom's fictional local access station.
Perd doesn't have a catchphrase, or one single, memorable line, like Liz Lemon's "I want to go to there" (30 Rock) or Sheldon Cooper's "Bazinga" (The Big Bang Theory). But Jackson has noticed that fans shout out one line more than any other. "One I hear a lot, and it's the most requested line I get on Cameo, which is really odd, is where I say, 'It's a heartwarming story, but it's just not believable. Which is why I give it one-and-a-half stars.'"
Parks and Recreation/YouTube
That Perd line comes from season 5's "Bailout," in which Ron (Nick Offerman) and Leslie (Amy Poehler) clash over whether to call upon the government to help save a failing local video store. Making her case to save the Pawnee Video Dome, Leslie explains early into the episode, "This is a Pawnee institution. This is the place where Perd Hapley shot his movie review show,Lights, Camera, Perd."
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"That's the one they always want to hear. I don't even know why they want to hear it, because it wasn't one of the main lines of the show," Jackson wonders. "Another one they want to hear is this — 'I just realized I'm not holding my microphone!' On Cameo, that's always the request."
Before Perd, before acting at all, Jackson worked for decades as a professional broadcast journalist, most memorably with KCAL9 News in Los Angeles. People on the street used to approach him before his entertainment pivot, or shoot him questioning looks, as if trying to place where they know him. But now, Jackson says, almost all approaches are Perd-related.
"People remember those days. Some remember that I'm actually a reporter in Los Angeles, and they don't even see Perd," Jackson says. "They see me as a reporter from Los Angeles kind of doing a side hustle. But now it's something different, a totally different universe, and every day I go out."
Parks and Recreation/YouTube
Jackson previously told EW that hegot help from a fellow newsmanwhen shaping Perd into one ofParks' best guest stars.
He recalls Alex Hardcastle, the director of his firstParksepisode, telling him to "'go over the top with it.' So I started to go over the top with it, and it reminded me of a reporter in Los Angeles. He had a unique clip in the way he would do the news."
Jackson says it was an NBC 4 newscaster named Furnell Chatman who helped inspire Perd, due to "this very strange way [he had] of doing the news," most notably his powerfully persuasive presenter's voice. It ended up being a "mix of this serious voice, which was my reporter voice, and this local news guy, Furnell Chatman," that made Perd Hapley into theParksfan favorite he is today.
Read the original article onEntertainment Weekly
