Maxim Magazine - June 2002
Hot For Teacher
Homework was never quite like this: With Borg-babe-turned-Boston Public-star Jeri Ryan hanging in the teachers lounge, we're hoping to be graded on a curve.
We hear a lot of carping about sorry state of America's educational system. We bet those naysayers haven't turned in to see Jeri Ryan on Fox's hit Boston Public. As teacher Ronnie Cooke, Jeri's addition to the cast brightened the show's second season, and now SAT scores aren't the only thing on the rise at fictitious Winslow High. Of course, injecting a little sex appeal into TV is something Jeri knows about, having set our faces on stunned as extraterrestrial temptress Seven of Nine of Star Trek: Voyager. But we know you're interested in Jeri for her mind: The former National Merit Scholar is also a Northwestern University graduate. Plus, she represented Illinois in the Miss America pageant. After hitting the books all day, Jeri found the time to join us for a late-night cram session. Pencils down...
Long before you started molding young minds, your father was a U.S. Army officer. How many different places were you raised in?
How much time do you have? I was born in Munich, and we lived in {takes a breath} Kansas, Maryland, Hawaii, Georgia, Texas, and finally settled in Paducah, Kentucky.
Did you have a typical army brat experience?
Depends how you define typical! As a kid it’s tough to always be pulling up your roots. For the most part we weren’t living on military bases, and all the other neighborhood kids had grown up with the same friends and lived in the same houses all their lives. When I was little, I thought, wouldn’t that be great? Looking back, I can appreciate the experience. It certainly lends itself to a life of an actor because it’s nomadic and unstable.
Was Dad a strict disciplinarian?
Oh, he’s the biggest pussycat. He cries at Kodak commercials. To this day he cuts out everything with my name in it. He still carries my Miss America clippings in his wallet.
We know you were a good student in high school. Does this imply that you were also a good girl?
I was a REALLY good girl. And then there was my brother – he was brilliant, so he was bored silly in school. Teachers would come up to me and say, “Thank God you’re not like your brother!” He was the wild one, but he didn’t want to hear of anything his little sister was doing off the straight and narrow. So we’d go to parties in high school, and I’d have a wine cooler in my hand, and everybody would be on the lookout for me. “Oh, your brother’s coming!” and then they’d grab my drink.
You don’t have to name any names, but were you ever hot for one of your teachers?
Oh, I’ll name a name. In high school everybody had a crush on Mr. McGroarty, the physiology teacher. I took a couple of classes with him, actually. They were advanced courses, but everybody would try to sign up for them – even the remedial kids.
Did college come as easily for you as high school?
Well… freshman year I joined a sorority and threw myself, into a disgusting degree, into Greek life. I’d go out every night of the week – to a cotillion on Wednesday, then a social on Thursday, then a mixer on Friday – and then the parties on the weekends, of course. Not a lot of studying got done.
In the midst of all this partying, how did you get sucked into the beauty pageant circuit?
My formative years were spent in the South, so for me it didn’t have the stigma it did for everybody else. I’d already done the Miss Summer Festival pageant and things like that; then when I got to college there was a Miss Northwestern pageant, and I knew there’d probably be some eight people in it and that it probably wouldn’t be that difficult. And it was a $1,000 scholarship. So I won, and then I was obligated to compete for Miss Illinois, and then I won that. And I was not at all prepared. Because then you have to go to Miss America.
I’m picturing a Rocky-like training montage.
No! Come on! I bought a dress and picked a song to sing – that was the extent of it. There’s a preliminary weekend where they prep you, and they handed me this packing list that was two pages long. They want you to be prepared just in case you win, because right after the pageant they sweep you off to New York. And I had nothing. Nuh-thing. I didn’t have underwear for a week! So we took the list and ripped it into three pieces. I gave one piece to my mom and one piece to my boyfriend, and we split up and shopped for everything.
Were all the contestants as laid-back as you?
A lot of them were there to have fun, but some of them were total tire-biters. There was one girl who would visualize herself winning. I wanted to go to her and be, like, "What about the 50 other women who are visualizing themselves winning? It can’t work for all of you!"
So tell us, Miss Illinois, if you had one wish for the world, what would it be?
[laughs] You’re an asshole.
Wish granted. And when did you decide you wanted to act?
For as long as I can remember. OK, sorry, when I was a little girl I wanted to be a movie star - the art of acting had nothing to do with it. That or a veterinarian.
The animal kingdom’s loss is our gain. What was your most embarrassing gig before Voyager?
My first job, fresh out of college, was doing an episode of Who’s the Boss?, and it’s just cringe-inducing. A sitcom is filmed in front of a live audience, so it’s kind of like being in a play. And in the theater you project your voice to the back row. Well, nobody bothered to tell me that there was a microphone six inches above my damn head. So when the show aired, there I was, yelling every one of my lines. I sounded like the biggest moron in the history of the world. And it sill reruns all the time. That show will haunt me forever.
For readers not familiar with Star Trek, can you explain how an entire race of cybernetically enhanced humanoids yields only one incredibly attractive female?
Everything about it was so bizarre. You can’t be born in this half-century and not be aware of Star Trek, but I’d never been a sci-fi buff and didn’t know anything about Voyager. I passed on the audition several times. When my agent brought it up, I was, like, “No. No. No, no, no!” But finally I met with the producers, and [Star Trek head honcho] Rick Berman had the best piece of advice. He said, "You’re getting on a moving freight train, and you have no idea how fast you’re going until you’re on it." That was the most apt description of my first year on Voyager.
Were you prepared for the attention that comes from being one of the few sci-fi sex symbols?
I don’t think I was, and it really took some adjustment. But you don’t get into television or film to be anonymous. If you want that, do theater. For the most part, fan attention has been very nice. They’re very passionate, but they’re incredibly loyal.
I think the free world needs to know the answer to the question: What became of Seven’s skintight costume?
I was hoping for a bonfire, but apparently it’s in some touring Star Trek museum. The irony is that the costume looked so simple- just a unitard, the most comfortable thing in the world – but it had a corset under it. I couldn’t wear panties because the lines would show, and apparently they don’t wear bras in the 24th century! And they wanted it to be completely formfitting. But fabric doesn’t stretch to fit the contours of a body – it stretches from high point to high point in a straight line so they had to figure out a way to construct fabric to make it hug my contours – specifically, so they could see two individual breasts instead of a breast mound. It was quite a feat of engineering – and brutal to wear.
Have you ever appeared at a Star Trek convention?
You sort of have to. It’s not in your contract, but you feel you owe it to the fans. Believe me, it’s not a tough audience. You could fall on your face and they’d give you a standing ovation. But my first convention was difficult. Literally, I walked into the hotel lobby and was met by a mob of Klingons greeting me in the Klingon language. I turned around and walked right back out. I sort of freaked out for a few minutes and then came to the realization that it’s no different than rabid football fans who take their shirts off in the middle of winter or wear cheese on their heads. It’s their social outlet.
You went from playing a female cyborg to playing a schoolteacher. Do you only look for characters that can be sexually fetishized?
[laughs] Yes, that is my number one criterion in choosing roles. I’m hoping in my next job I can play a shoe saleswoman. No, I pick roles that are intelligent and tough and present some challenges as an actor. With Boston Public, nobody knew what Ronnie would be. [Series creator] David E. Kelley didn’t know, and he was writing it for me. I found out a week before shooting that I was going to be this lawyer-turned-teacher. I could’ve been the lunch lady. I could’ve been a drug-addled prostitute.
We’re just glad your first scene was in the shower.
I wasn’t overjoyed when I got the first two scripts and saw that I was naked for two episodes in a row. But the way David explained it to me was, he wanted to show that the character wasn’t all together – she seems like she’s got everything in order, but really her private life is not all perfect. Whatever.
Are there any plans for a very special episode of Boston Public where nobody gets shot, nobody gets pregnant, and everybody goes home happy?
What’s the fun in that? Somehow I don’t see that happening. There’s controversy every week, but that’s what the show does so brilliantly. It gets people talking.
How would you feel about inflicting corporal punishment on your fictional class?
Yeah, I’d bring out the “Bored of education.” The attitude adjuster. We had corporal punishment in my high school. A teacher would take you into the hallway and whack you with the paddle. Hard! You could hear it from the classroom. I never got paddled, but every boy got it at least once a week.
So what could we do to make you keep us after class?
I don’t want you chewing food in class. No snacking. Don’t make obnoxious noises. That’s my number one pet peeve.
Excuse me, are you aware of which magazine you’re in?
I know! You guys live for obnoxious noises!
JERI AT A GLACE
Vital stats: Born Jeri Lynn Zimmerman on February 22, 1968 in Munich, Germany. "My brother, Mark, was born a year before me. I don't know what I'M the one that got named after my father."
Favorite school subject: English literature and geometry. "But I hated math. Geometry wasn't math; it was logic. ANd then they started throwing letters in with the numbers - and that's just bullshit."
Favorite concert: Cheap Trick. "I waited for hours and hours to position myself at the front of the stage, and then Robin Zander sang 'She's Tight' to me, and I bawled. I was 12 years old."
Resistance is futile: Jeri's greatest temptation? Food. "It doesn't even matter what kind. Shopping is probably a close second, but food is the big one."
Stance on public displays of affection: "Holding hands and a little tasteful kissing are fine. But I don't want to see people sticking their toungues down each other's throats. And no groping."
Personal Waterloo: Losing to Sinbad on Celebrity Jeopardy! "The damn buzzer did me in! If you buzz in too soon, you get locked out, and it won't let you buzz back in. It was ugly."