TV Tinsel: Scott Porter on his circuitous journey to ‘Ginny & Georgia'

Miami Herald

27-05-2025

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - Actor Scott Porter can make sounds with his throat like a trumpet or an electric guitar or even sleigh bells. But somehow that's not a big seller in show business. Fortunately for Porter he found something else he was good at: acting.
Making musical gurgles doesn't sound like a sure way to the top. But he says he's been forced to entertain by his own DNA. "I came up in a performing family," he explains.
"My mom and dad met in a rock band when I was 6 years old, and I traveled with them quite a bit. I helped my dad set up his drums set, would fall asleep in the bar manager's office, or play foosball with the bouncer while they played up on stage across the Midwest. So performance was a part of my DNA from a very young age," he says.
Folks can see the results when they view the affable Porter playing the city mayor in the Netflix dramady, "Ginny & Georgia," returning on June 5.
As it might sound, Porter's journey from his native Omaha, Nebraska, to "Ginny & Georgia" was a circuitous one. A self-described "extroverted introvert," he moved often as a kid as his parents pursued their careers.
While Porter never knew his bio-dad, he is devoted to his stepfather and extended family. "Being a son of artists, which are what my parents are in their hearts, we jumped around a lot," he says.
"I went to six different elementary and middle schools. I was always the new kid. I was always having to fight to find my place in whatever new situation I was in. Being the new kid puts a little bit of a chip on your shoulder. You have to prove yourself to everybody around you at all times so that you can fit in as quickly as possible and have some type of safety net or find one friend at least to hang onto. And being an only child, that was going through all of those switches by myself."
It was his love of reading and a vivid imagination that pushed him through. "I would play multi-week campaigns with my G.I. Joes where there would be a full storyline and there would be tragedy and comedy and triumphs," he chuckles.
He also loved video games and proved an avid reader. "As a kid I was very just interested in long-form storytelling and being whisked away from my bedroom in Nebraska to incredible lands and other places and living life through those stories."
The 45-year-old Porter was an only child until he was 7 and then he got a brother - only to lose him two years later. The boy was a foster child, and as Porter puts it, "The state doesn't always have your back in this situation, and eventually we lost custody of him back to the state and back to his family. And saying goodbye to him was a very large shaping part of my life."
Two more siblings eventually arrived, but Porter was already 15 when his sister was born, 18 when his brother was delivered.
As a high school graduate, Porter planned to play football and major in structural engineering at Carnegie Mellon, when he unexpectedly snagged a job. "Music was a passion of mine, and I had been performing to help pay my way through school when I was offered a full-time position singing doo-wop music at Universal Studios in Florida. And once I started taking a paycheck to work full time as a performer and realized, at 19, that I might be able to make a living doing this, there was no turning back."
That job led to "beatboxing," which is making musical sounds with your voice. Porter traveled the world beatboxing and earned a role in the off-Broadway show "Altar Boyz" which eventually led to an agent.
He had been acting only a year when he landed the role of a lifetime. He played the team quarterback who is paralyzed after an injury in the unforgettable NBC series "Friday Night Lights."
"To say it changed my life doesn't begin to approach what 'Friday Night Lights' actually did for me," he says. "There was a trust from the very top of the show with Pete Berg and Jason Katims all the way down to every member of our crew on set."
Even so Porter suffered a fallow period just before "Ginny & Georgia" surfaced. "I had really been starving for work for about two years. I wasn't booking anything, and I looked at my wife and I said, 'I think I need to do something to jump-start my career again and I don't know what that is.' And I was scared that was this my time. Do I never work again? And am I not good enough anymore?"
He was performing in local theater when the pivotal role in "Ginny & Georgia" appeared. While Porter's engrossed in his work, he's also a steadfast family man. He's the father of two children, and his wife of 12 years has been diagnosed with Huntington's disease.
Porter is in Huntsville to support a charity which seeks to educate people about the disease and to eventually find a cure.
And so far, his wife, Kelsey, is without symptoms. "But from the moment that she found out she had HD, she looked at me with a stillness that I still can't describe to this day and said, 'It was a 50-50 shot. It was a coin flip, and it came up tails.' And within two hours, a drive home and a quiet lunch at home, she turned to me and said, 'I want to be a mother as long as I can, so let's figure out how to have kids safely.' And we did. We went on a very long journey with IVF to make sure that our children did not have the Huntington's gene."
The real Pee-Wee exposed in documentary
Paul Reubens, better known as Pee-wee Herman, is the subject of an intense two-part documentary streaming on Max called "Pee-wee as Himself."
Viewers who remember his man-child character always knew him as Pee-wee, and that's the way he wanted it. Reubens insisted on maintaining his alter-ego in public, so the real person behind the white cheeked mask is little known.
He was famous for his five-season run on CBS's "Pee-wee's Playhouse" and several Pee-wee films, as well as appearances all over screenland.
In "Pee-wee as Himself" documentarian Matt Wolf exposes the real man behind the clownish character. But it was not easy, says Wolf.
"When Paul sat down, he was very rebellious and slippery. He wouldn't follow my lead with any questions. He wanted snacks, pretzels, lollipops. He would make funny facial expressions, and it was a competitive dynamic. I remember before the shoot, I said 'Typically when we do these interviews, people sort of get tired around five hours.' And he said, 'I'm not gonna get tired, you're gonna get tired.' And I said, 'Well actually I could literally go on forever.' So it was kind of like game-on from the beginning. But he was sort of rebelling, procrastinating, giving me a hard time."
Wolf eventually coaxed Reubens into revealing uncomfortable truths about himself. But he kept one thing from everybody - even Wolf. And that was the diagnosis of leukemia and lung cancer. "I'm en route to Los Angeles to proceed with filming this final interview, and I got a text from my executive at HBO with a post from Instagram saying, 'Is this real?'
"And it was a post that announced that Paul Reubens had passed away. And I was just in total, total shock. And I called Emma (Tillinger Koskoff), our producer, and we were just surreal. Like nothing you can imagine experiencing that someone you've spoken to for literally hundreds and hundreds of hours could keep a secret like this from you."
Tudyk returns to alien country
Alan Tudyk not only returns as everybody's favorite alien in "Resident Alien," he's also directing the first two episodes of Season 4, premiering on USA and Syfy June 6. The series will stream on Peacock a week later.
Tudyk is hilarious as the alien who's desperate to fit in with an exotic society that he doesn't understand. Like most actors, he struggled for several years before he landed on the stage and accelerated his career.
Money was really tight, he says. And while he was struggling, he made one commercial for General Mills. "It was when they were lowering their prices on their cereals, and I played a kid who was lowering prices in the aisle. And I get stampeded by a bunch of people. I made $4,000. I got a check for $3,000, and I left the next day for Spain. And I spent it all. I always wanted to travel. So I went to Spain, came home from Spain and rent was due, and I thought, 'Oh, I spent all my money.' And then I won the Clarence Derwent (acting) award which gave me a good amount of money for rent. So things have been fortunate."
Film features Reddick's last role
The fifth film in the "John Wick" franchise arrives in box offices June 6. This one is titled "From the World of John Wick: Ballerina," and stars Ana de Armas as the protagonist who is undergoing assassin training.
It also features the last role played by Lance Reddick who died of heart disease two years ago. Reddick was a classy man, and when I interviewed him shortly before his death, he told me, "Acting was something I literally stumbled onto late. I was 27 when I started acting. I studied classical music and thought I was going to be a classical composer.
"I went to Eastman School of Music and left Eastman because I realized I was in denial and I really wanted to be a rock star," he said.
"So I got married straight out of school, moved to Boston because my wife at the time was from there. Two years later my daughter was born, and I found myself working three jobs seven days a week."
It was then that he suffered a serious back injury. "I was lifting a big bundle of newspapers, but it wasn't the lifting itself, it was the exhaustion. I'd come from a double shift of waiting tables to a double shift of delivering newspapers, and I delivered the Wall Street Journal in downtown Boston, and it was the 100th anniversary of the Wall Street Journal so it was a double edition.
"I just cranked it up for about 24 hours, and I was just exhausted and something went. At the time I was used to working on adrenaline, and I worked out every day - even with all I had going on. So when I was in pain or exhausted, I just ignored it and kept going," he said.
"About two weeks later I woke up one day and couldn't' get out of bed. I was in bed for about two weeks, and it really made me reevaluate what I was doing. It sounds crazy but I thought, 'Well, I know the recording studio I'm working with is taking me for a ride. It's time for me to admit that to myself. So let me start from scratch. I can sing and I can act. So let me try to act.'"
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