Luke Perry didn’t have the gift of old age. But the 52-year-old actor, who died Monday after having a massive stroke last…
Luke Perry didn’t have the gift of old age. But the 52-year-old actor, who died Monday after having a massive stroke last week, did achieve something very few actors do. He became an icon of his time.
In the early 1990s, there didn’t seem to be anyone more popular than the young man who played Dylan McKay on “Beverly Hills 90210.” In his day, he could fill a mall with screaming fans faster than any star from 2019’s TV listings.
Dylan was awesome. Dylan was special. Dylan was…in a word…cool.
Here are some of the things that made Perry’s portrait of a high school student as a young rebel so memorable. It was a role that he owned. And Dylan is ours forever now, thanks to streaming sites.
The T-shirts. The motorcycle. Those ironic eyebrows. That rebellious flip of hair. The smoldering looks delivered with that impossible mix of desire, regret and yearning. The first time Perry appeared as Dylan — it was after the pilot episode, FYI — his charisma instantly raised the level of the ‘90210’ game, “Perry was so instantly cool and magnetic in the role that he transformed what had seemed an earnest culture clash comedy into something more addictively melodramatic and soapy,” wrote Alan Sepinwall in a Rolling Stone on Monday.
