Stage, screen and TV actor Harry Lennix, a friend of Keith Robinson, assistant principal of operations, visited Niles North recently to speak to theatre department students. He also took some time for a press conference with northstarnews. Lennix was in town for the Chicago Film Festival when Robinson invited him to spend some time with North students.
A Chicago native, Lennix has been acting for 30 years; he is best known for his roles as Terrence “Dresser” Williams in the movie The Five Heartbeats, and as Boyd Langton in TV’s Dollhouse. He plays an army general in the Superman reboot Man of Steel and is the chief of surgery in the new TV series on the CW, Emily Owens, M.D. “I’ve covered just about all of the genres of film.. I worked about every level of production, from very very small microbudget movies that cost $2,000 to movies that cost $200 million,” Lennix said.
Lennix produced a movie called Mr. Sophistication, which he was promoting at the Chicago Film Festival.
Lennix attended Quigley Preparatory Seminary South High School which later became St. Rita of Cascia High School. His acting career started in elementary school and continued at Quigley, an all-boys school, “in between baseball and track and field season…. to meet girls since baseball players don’t have cheerleaders and couldn’t really meet girls…” Linnix said.
Linnex’s talent was then revealed his senior year by visiting professional actors while performing in the musical Oliver! The pros advised him to continue his acting because of his potential.
For college, he attended Niles Seminary College of Loyola for half of a semester, and then transferred to Northwestern, majoring in Speech with a concentration in theater. Throughout his college career, Lennix received a lot of recognition. At 19, he “booked [his] first professional job at the Goodman Theater in a play called Government Inspector,” Lennix said.
For awhile, he worked in Chicago theater. At 24, he moved to Los Angeles and got a role in The Five Heartbeats, a movie about a group of soulsingers.
Some of his recent productions are Emily Owens, M.D., Man of Steel and Mr. Sophistication. Particularly pertaining to Emily Owens, M.D., Lennix’s character plays an important role as the Chief of Surgery. He also assures his audience of some “interesting and tense” upcoming scenes with his TV daughter in that series.
As for Mr. Sophistication, in which Lennix acts and helped produce, “We intend to do a limited self-release throughout the U.S., probably in big urban populations such as Houston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York”
Lennix described TV series production as the “golden handcuffs” since it is extremely exhausting on the mind and the body. Actors have to work for what ends up to be 12 or more hours a day on the set, for months at a time. Yet after meeting with students drawn to acting, Lennix cautioned them “to be honest with [themselves] about what [they] want and to find a way to do something else in addition to what [their] passion is.” He advised them to study, find different resources and mentors for help throughout the way. “If you want it, go get it,” Lennix said.
Then he exited, stage left.
