John C. Reilly, this is your Chicago life

DePaul Theatre School's Curse of the Rising Class, 1987

Formative years: Take a walk on the Southwest Side
Part of the reason John C. Reilly plays the regular guy so well is because he grew up that way. Born John Christopher Reilly in 1965, the half-Irish, half-Lithuanian actor was raised in a bungalow near Marquette Park on the gritty Southwest Side. One of six children, he attended all-male Catholic high school Brother Rice, following fellow alums Michael “Lord of the Dance” Flatley and REO Speedwagon’s Kevin Cronin into the arts. He discovered acting as an adolescent, and when he wasn’t working at his father’s commercial laundry company he could be found in high-school productions of musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar, where he developed song-and-dance skills he’d later showcase in the film Chicago and the upcoming Walk Hard.

DePaul: “This guy’s gonna do well”
After graduating from Brother Rice in 1983, Reilly studied theater at DePaul. And while professor John Jenkins, who taught Reilly in his senior-year ensemble class, recalls some minor discipline problems (“I remember some kind of bind…excessive absences maybe?” Jenkins says), he gave his student an A. Jenkins also remembers Reilly’s graduate showcase—a monologue based on a local panhandler. “He wrote it himself, and based it on his observations of this guy,” Jenkins says. “It was typical of John’s work in terms of imagination; modeling stuff from life. There was a sense among the faculty that this guy is a really good actor, and he’s gonna do well.”

Steppenwolf's A Streetcar Named Desire, 1997

Steppenwolf: Coulda been a member
Reilly’s first professional acting gig took place at Chicago’s Organic Theater, where he wrote, directed and appeared in a series of monologues called “Walkin’ the Boogie.” Soon, Reilly found himself on the Steppenwolf stage, where, just one year after his college graduation, he played Noah in the 1988 production of The Grapes of Wrath. Steppenwolf ensemble member Rick Snyder—who appeared with Reilly in Grapes, and in Reilly’s 1997 return to Chicago for his role as Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire—says Reilly would’ve made a perfect addition to Steppenwolf. “He commented to me on a couple of occasions [during Streetcar] that he would have loved to be a member of the company,” Snyder says. “But then his [film] career, like, bang!, took off.”

Reilly left Streetcar to start filming the 1998 film The Thin Red Line, which, along with his 1997 Boogie Nights depiction of porn star Chest Rockwell, propelled him to Hollywood’s top tier of can’t-miss character actors. Chicago may have lost an A-list thespian when Reilly took off for the Left Coast, but in our opinion, Chest Rockwell is reason enough to support his exodus.