Katie Lowes has done a 360-degree turn on “Scandal.”
As Quinn Perkins, Lowes has been moved into the show’s lurid spotlight as a key player in a bizarre story that involved scenes of torture. Once lost and insecure, she gave an inkling of the ferocity to come last season when she grabbed a power tool and tortured the vice president’s chief of staff.
“What do your friends say about the new Quinn?” I ask Lowes, a native of Port Washington and a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
“None of my friends have said Quinn has gone too far,” she says. “I hear a lot of, ‘Oh, this is crazy.’ But I think people are along for the ride.”
The ride is a bumpy one now that Quinn, once one of Olivia Pope’s (Kerry Washington) Gladiators, has been branded a traitor and has joined the dark side with her new beau, the murder-for-hire assassin Charlie (George Newbern).
“I just love that I got to torture somebody, and then at the end Charlie throws Quinn up against a wall and makes out with her,” says Lowes, 32. “Who would ever think that my character would end up this way?”
Two years ago Lowes was a waitress, as well as a nanny working for “Nashville” star Connie Britton.
“I wanted to be Connie’s personal assistant,” she says. “She had seen me on an episode of ‘Private Practice’ and thought I might be the real deal, so she told me to wait until pilot season was over. If I didn’t get an acting job then she would hire me as her assistant.”
The leap to TV series regular was fast. A few weeks later she read the part of Quinn for “Scandal” creator Shonda Rhimes. Her only note? Do it again — and do it faster.
“I am a New Yorker; talking fast is my strong suit,” says Lowes. “But I have spent my whole career having people tell me to slow it down — so it was amazing.”
She was offered the part after only one audition. “I just started bawling,” she says. “It was the most magical experience.”
As the show starts returns this week from its winter hiatus, it seems that Quinn is in deeper than ever. Has Quinn really gone to the dark side of B-613, or is she secretly still one of Olivia’s Gladiators?
“All I can say is that the train has gone completely off the track, there are no rules. She has jumped with both feet into this dark and disturbing world,” says Lowes.
How did Quinn become so violent? Was it that time when she hit the shooting range and her eyes lit up? One day she was Huck’s (Guillermo Diaz) protégée, and the next minute it seemed she had turned into a female Huck. After that scene with the power drill, there was no stopping her — even after Huck tortured Quinn by pulling out her teeth to insert a microchip.
That scene sent the Twitterverse into a tizzy — and may go down as this show’s jump-the-shark moment.
“It took 14 hours to shoot,” she says. “I couldn’t have done that with anyone but Guillermo. We are super-tight friends. We are both theater people and have a very close relationship.” (Lowes is a co-founder of the IAMA Theatre Company in Los Angeles)
The duo is so close on screen that they are know by their fans as #huckleberryquinn. And one fan, who believes she has betrayed him, recently tweeted: “Don’t f— ! With Huck!”
But hey, give Charlie a chance. “He does love Quinn,” says Newbern. “She is the closest thing he has had to a girlfriend since high school. But he is really scared that Huck is going to hurt her — or him.”
The love triangle will continue for the rest of the season. And perhaps, soon, we will get answers about whom Quinn is really working for. When you last saw her, she was cutting that tracking device out of her mouth, having refused to kill Olivia’s father (Joe Morton), the former head of B-613.
“It is really crazy,” says Lowes. “I jumped into this crazy, dark, disturbing world. And all I can say is ‘thank you.’ ”
Quinn is not the only violent female on the show: Olivia’s mother (Khandi Alexander) is an international terrorist. And the Bible-thumping vice president (Kate Burton) just killed her husband in a gay-cheating scandal.
Does Lowes believe these characters bear any semblance of reality?
“I do think the DC people get in this much trouble, but it’s just not packed into 42 minutes,” she says. “Judy Smith [the crisis manager who handled the Monica Lewinsky scandal and is the basis for Olivia Pope] is around a lot. The cases we are working on are inspired by real things.”
The first time I saw Lowes she was skipping toward the sound stage at Sunset Gower studios, where “Scandal” films, holding hands with Kerry Washington. On the set, she got a hug from her husband, Adam Shapiro — who played Quinn’s doomed boyfriend, Jesse. It all seemed so normal.
So it was a surprise both to her when Rhimes did what she always does — mixes it up, stands the character on her head and turns her into a covert ops assassin.
“That’s why I skip to work,” says Lowes. “I never thought I would be doing anything like this — torture, sex scenes. Shonda Rhimes, I can’t thank you enough.”