Jeff Perry Reveals How Alaska Daily With Hilary Swank Honors Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women
This just in: Alaska Daily is back in circulation.
After a four-month winter hiatus, the ABC drama about Anchorage's Daily Alaskan newspaper officially returns for a new episode March 2. Ahead of the mid-season premiere, star Jeff Perry told E! News all about the shocking cliffhanger that left Hilary Swank's Eileen in peril.
Fans will recall the Nov. 17 mid-season finale saw Eileen finally come face-to-face with her stalker as he held her at gunpoint within the paper's mini-mall office.
"It's an amazing episode," Perry shared. "It's a brilliantly written episode and I think brilliantly acted by the others. I'm OK."
The journalism drama centers on small town coverage (or lack thereof) surrounding Alaska's missing and murdered Indigenous women, or MMIW. Perry, who plays managing editor Stanley, also revealed how the series—created by Tom McCarthy and based on Lawless: Sexual Violence in Alaska for the Anchorage Daily News—aims to honor real-life victims.
"We were visited by survivors of everything—assault, sexual abuse, rape, kidnapping, murder—on our set more than once," he recalled. "A group of Indigenous women and men talked to us and presented a story, almost a piece of theater and dance and music, that spoke to their struggle and to their determination and to their activism."
Perry continued, "They're reaching out for sisters and brothers who would help them in their activism and in their determination to lessen what has been decades, even hundreds of years of a systemic problem where Indigenous women suffer in a grossly exaggerated comparison to the non-Indigenous population in the Americas."
The show has drawn comparisons to a different devastating story of abuse, McCarthy's 2015 film Spotlight. The Oscar winner for Best Picture depicted the Boston Globe's investigation into corruption within the Catholic Church. It's another example of an unfortunate trend that Perry said "Tom has helped educate us on."
"The Indigenous humans that we have met have helped educate us and it's something that we really care about," Perry noted. "Local journalism, small journalism, mid-size journalism—much less national or international journalism—is sometimes a very important guardrail, sometimes the only guardrail, that can shine a light and that can help provide evidence and prove that things don't have to be this way."
While Alaska Daily is still in its first printing (er, season), the show has already received recognition in the form of Swank's Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress. It marked an association that the Scandal and Grey's Anatomy alum is honored to refer to as "justice" for such a talented cast, which also includes Grace Dove, Pablo Castelblanco, Meredith Holzman, Matt Malloy, Ami Park and Craig Frank.
"I'm a basketball man," Perry explained. "So, I felt like I was on a team where, 'Oh, Hilary just got added to the All-Star Team.' That's right. That's justified."
"Sometimes I'm just a fan at a movie theatre or something," he added. "I'm watching her and a little voice in my head goes, 'Jeff, you're supposed to be in the ballgame here. You're supposed to be in a scene with her. Quit fan crushing on her and get back in the ballgame.' I think she's an amazing artist."
Read all about it, or rather watch all about it, when Alaska Daily returns March 2 at 10 p.m. EST on ABC.
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