Jon Cryer

Jon Cryer has made a name for himself over the nearly 40 years he has been in Hollywood. Well-liked, very well respected, dependable, and very funny are descriptions that surround Cryer, and each and every one of those is well-earned.

He has made people laugh, he has made people cry, and he has made people root for the “effeminate heterosexual dork.” It is hard not to like Jon Cryer or any of the characters he has portrayed over his lengthy career.

JON CRYER WAS ALMOST CAST AS CHANDLER IN FRIENDS

Jon Cryer was a wanted man. He starred in his first TV series, The Famous Teddy Z. In 1991, Cryer became good friends with Charlie Sheen (which ends up being very key in Cryer’s career) when they starred together in the Top Gun parody, Hot Shots!

The film was made by director Jim Abrahams, who already had hit parody films like Airplane! and Top Secret! Abrahams (along with the Zucker’s, David and Jerry) is also responsible for Police Squad!, the series that started The Naked Gun trilogy with Leslie Nielsen.

It was during Jon Cryer’s rise that he received a call while he was in London doing a play. The call came from Marta Kauffman and she wanted him to read for a role on a new show she was hoping to get picked up by one of the networks.

She wanted him to read for a character named Chandler Bing for a series called Friends. “She said, let me fax you the pages,” Cryer recalled via The Trades. “I didn’t have a fax machine but I did have my computer, so I figured I’d just hook it up to the phone and she’d fax me the pages. What I forgot was that the British phone jacks are different than American phone jacks. So I had to rewire the phone to hook up to the British jack and hook that into my computer. Then they faxed me the pages.”

The fax machine headaches notwithstanding, Cryer didn’t get the pages until 3 a.m. London time. He was ill-prepared when he went in the following morning to read and put it on tape. Although Cryer says he did the best he could under the circumstances, he didn’t deliver a solid audition.

Apparently, though, even if it had been a great audition, it would not have mattered because “the tape got stuck in customs and did not get back to the network until they had already cast Matthew Perry.” Bummer.

For the next dozen years, Jon Cryer continued to be dependable and get work. He bounced back and forth from feature films and guest starring on TV series.

Then he was in the features Glam, Plan B, and Holy Man while finding time on series such as Dharma & Greg, Hercules, Getting Personal, The Trouble with Normal, The Practice, Becker, and Hey Joel. What all this television work was doing for him was getting him ready for the biggest role in his career.

JON CRYER STARRED IN NO SMALL AFFAIR WITH DEMI MOORE

Jon Cryer is New York City born and bred. He was a 12-year-old when he informed his parents that he wanted to be an actor. Like most parents who hear their kid utter those words, she told her son that he should also have a plan B, telling him that “plumbing is a good career.” Cryer wasn’t fazed by his mother’s comment.

Instead, Cryer began to hone his craft over the course of a few summers at the Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Training Center. Cryer graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and counts director and screenwriter Boaz Yakin as a classmate. After high school, Jon Cryer decided to skip college and head across the Atlantic to take a summer course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, England.

Jon Cryer got his career started with the Broadway play, Torch Song Trilogy, when he replaced Matthew Broderick. Not long after, Cryer found himself as a standby and replacement for Broderick once again in Neil Simon’s Broadway hit, Brighton Beach Memoirs. Following in Broderick’s footsteps is what Cryer did early on.

Jon Cryer got his first feature film in 1984 when he was cast opposite Demi Moore in the romantic comedy, No Small Affair. The film had been set to shoot prior to Cryer getting the role but the production had to shut down after the film’s director, Martin Ritt, suffered a heart attack. When the film finally went back into production, Cryer stepped in for the original actor, you guessed it, Mathew Broderick.

No Small Affair was your typical ‘80s rom-com that received decent reviews but was not enough to kick-start Cryer’s career. He grabbed one role in 1985 (O.C. and Stiggs) but it was until 1986 that Jon Cryer nailed his breakout role.

JON CRYER IS IN PRETTY IN PINK

This came in the 1986 rom-com Pretty in Pink, where Cryer played Phillip F. Dale, better known as Duckie. You know you’re onto something when teenage girls are calling from all over the world and leaving giggling and hysterical messages on his mother’s answer machine. We’ll definitely be talking about Duckie a bit more.

Things were starting to pick up for Cryer after Pretty in Pink hit the theaters. He got the lead as Morgan Stewart in Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home. He grabbed a spot on Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and he was seen in Dudes. But along with Pretty in Pink, one of Jon Cryer’s best-known movies (even to this day) was his lead role as Max Hauser in the underrated comedy, Hiding Out.

The film saw Cryer’s Andrew Morenski, a stockbroker, forced to go on the run from gangsters after saying he would testify against them. His “hiding out” takes him to his aunt’s house where he ends up enrolling in the local high school to hide his identity.

HE STARS IN TWO AND A HALF MEN

Jon Cryer was not wanted by CBS executives to star as Alan Harper in Two and a Half Men. Apparently, though, Charlie Sheen had carried some weight and was insisting that Cryer get the role. While CBS was battling it out over who the role would go to, Cryer also auditioned for the role of Gaius Baltar in the Battlestar Galactica reboot.

As fate would have it, the role instead went to James Callis and CBS finally gave in and gave Jon Cryer the role of Alan Harper. Turns out it was one of the best moves CBS made.

Two and a Half Men was an immediate hit. Cryer and Sheen proved to have instant chemistry with the comedy. During the series’ 12-season run, Jon Cryer was nominated seven times for a Primetime Emmy Award coming home twice the victor. And it was obviously a huge financial windfall as well. By the end, Jon Cryer was earning $620,000 per episode of the hit sitcom.

JON CRYER KNEW CHARLIE SHEEN WAS HAVING ISSUES

Obviously, just about anything surrounding Charlie Sheen had the possibility of ending in controversy. Sadly, that was the case with Two and a Half Men. If you ask Jon Cryer, though, it wasn’t always that way on set. In fact, Cryer recently told Entertainment Tonight that he has nothing but fond memories, early on, working with Sheen. Of course, the keywords there were “early on.”

“In the early years, the life with Charlie Sheen was great,” Cryer said to ET. “We got along great, he had been sober for two years when we started the show, and it was really important to him to keep sober. And for those first few years, the show was also going so smoothly.”

Cryer could only gush about how Sheen took to a live audience as well. “He just had it straight out of the box like it was genetically programmed into his body. That was fun and very self-assured,” he said. “For those first couple of years, it was, you know, an incredible joy.” Unfortunately, Sheen could not outrun his demons. It wasn’t an immediate turn, it took some time, but according to Cryer, you could see it coming.

“When we started noticing things were getting stranger for him, and his marriage [to Denise Richards] fell apart, he was still lovely to work with, he still showed up on time and knew his lines and was doing the job. But you could tell that there was some trouble brewing,” Cryer said.

Then the small things turned into big things. Cryer claims Sheen began to have issues with the writing and writers. Cryer couldn’t understand why, saying he even went to Sheen to tell him, “This is the kind of joke you had no problem with a year and a half ago, and suddenly now it’s an issue?” But things got much worse and hit their zenith when Sheen began to feud with series co-creator Chuck Lorre.

“I think there was a moment where Chuck Lorre and I were looking at each other and we said, ‘It’s not worth this show going on if going on enables Charlie Sheen to kill himself,” Cryer explained via PEOPLE. “If giving him enough money to do whatever the thing is that ends his life, you know, we don’t want to be a part of that. And I think, actually, when Charlie was let go from the show, the first thought amongst most of us was, ‘OK, we’re done. This has been a great thing, but we’re done at this point.'”

The series would continue on for another four seasons when Ashton Kutcher was brought in to take Sheen’s place. Years later, Sheen would express regret for his behavior towards the end of his run on the hit series. “There was 55 different ways for me to handle that situation, and I chose number 56,” he told Yahoo! Entertainment. “And so, you know, I think the growth for me post-meltdown or melt forward or melt somewhere — however you want to label it — it has to start with absolute ownership of my role in all of it,” Sheen explained. “And it was desperately juvenile.”

Sheen did go on to admit it “was drugs or the residual effects of drugs” that led him down the path of destruction. Sheen also claims that stress and a “volcano of disdain” were also factors. He did admit that everything that happened was “self-generated.”

JON CRYER IS LEX LUTHOR ON SUPERGIRL

Jon Cryer’s career didn’t end when Two and a Half Men ran its final episode in 2015. On the contrary, his career has continued to flourish. Not only has Cryer continued to do excellent work guest starring on various TV series (NCIS, The Great Indoors, and The Ranch), but Jon Cryer also made a new name for himself playing one of DC Comics’ biggest baddies of them all, Lex Luthor.

Cryer was first seen as Luthor on the CBS/CW series Supergirl. After the series moved over to the CW, Cryer continued to play Luthor on Supergirl but also crossed over to the other DC CW series’ Batwoman, The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, and Arrow.

Jon Cryer is on social media but is not as active as some movie stars. He does most of his business on Twitter and does not have an Instagram account. Taking a look at his Twitter account, Cryer is not shy about delving into controversial topics.

MOLLY RINGWALD SAID JON CRYER’S DUCKIE WAS GAY

Throughout Jon Cryer’s career, there has always been the notion that he was gay. Cryer has actually been married twice (still is married) and has a son with his first wife. But because of how he carries himself on screen, and even in person, it just led many to assume. Not that he minds in the least.

Cryer’s co-star in Pretty in Pink, Molly Ringwald, caused a bit of a stir a while back when she was being interviewed by Out. The subject was broached about Cryer’s character Duckie and if Ringwald thought the character was gay. “Duckie doesn’t know he’s gay,” she told Out.

“I think he loves Andie in the way that [my gay best friend] always loved me. That [original ending, which had them together] fell so flat — it bombed at all the screenings. I didn’t realize it then — I just knew that my character shouldn’t end up with him, because we didn’t have that sort of chemistry. If John [screenwriter/director of the film] was here now, and I could talk to him, I think that he would completely acknowledge that.”

Of course, Cryer has his own take on Duckie and he is of the complete opposite mindset from Ringwald. “She actually said that if one projected beyond the movie, that Duckie would be out by now. And I respectfully disagree. I want to stand up for all the slightly effeminate dorks that are actually heterosexual,” Cryer said via the Inquisitr.

He added, “Just cause the gaydar is going off, doesn’t mean your instruments aren’t faulty. I’ve had to live with that, and that’s okay.” Cryer even had to joke about it, saying “Besides the fact that I am not actually gay… [no] gay men… have ever come on to me. If everybody thinks I’m gay, why aren’t you guys coming on to me?”