Law & Order role for Kathryn Markey ’84 just one stop in diversified career

Kathryn Markey ’84

When the call came in, Kathryn Markey ’84 was ready to respond to the scene and put her rigorous training and experience to good use.

This particular recent “call,” explains the New York City based actor/director and longtime Saint Michael’s Summer Playhouse regular, was to play a parole officer of the New York City Police Department for the long-running NBC TV police drama Law & Order.

“One time I was mistaken for a cop in a pizzeria in New Rochelle,” Markey posted in late January on social media in telling friends of her latest role. “Tonight hopefully I will be more successfully mistaken for a cop on Law & Order …”

“Every New York based actor works on Law & Order,” Markey said later in an interview. “The series has been running for more than 20 years and there are currently three editions of the show – the original, Special Victims Unit, and Organized Crime.” This recent appearance was on the original version.

“My agency submits me and gets me these jobs, so I’ve done several of them over the years,” she said. “They put you on the list once you’ve done one. It’s super fun to do, and right here in town, which is great.”

“The last one I did before this was for the Special Victims version and I was the mother of a child sold into sex slavery and they found her again,” Markey said, adding that her ability to cry on cue as a seasoned professional actor helped in that one. “Now in this one, I’ve gone over to the other side” as one of the police.

Markey said her direct real-life exposure to policing (she is proud to never have been arrested) involves hanging out with a brother-in-law who is a cop — the one who was with her in the New Rochelle pizzeria, causing confusion among patrons about her own identity.

Beyond that, her father, the legendary Saint Michael’s longtime Athletic Director Ed Markey ’51, was the son of a cop just outside New York City, though her grandfather died before she was born, the actor said.

Law & Order jobs can be relatively rewarding even financially for actors, since “you get paid when it airs, and then when it is in reruns, you get residuals for years to come,” she said. “The more you work, the more you get.”

Her most recent part as a parole officer occurred quite early in the episode and Markey said she had about six lines — but even that comes with some pressure. “The scene is shot quickly so you have to get everything right and can’t make a mistake or trip over a syllable since time is money. You have to help the principals get their job done, get every word precisely how they wrote it.”

She described the pre-shoot scene at the set: “I’m sitting in a trailer, waiting to be called and then I have to go in, hit it and get out with the writer standing right there,” she said, explaining that writers on TV shows often also are producers.

The show’s producers shot the scene with Markey in an old office in Manhattan that Law & Order uses regularly — “it might have been a school at one point,” she said. “First thing in the morning, they shot a scene running through a park when the light was good, then a scene questioning a guy in a restaurant, and then my scene in an office. They often plan by daylight.”

She was pleased but not too surprised that two actor friends of hers had other roles in the same episode, one a medical examiner and one the wife of a victim. “Everyone works on this show,” Markey said.

When it comes to auditioning for any acting work these days, Markey said, “everything has changed” since COVID. “Now you do an audition at home on tape from your own living room” as opposed to going in-person as was common before. That works better for TV shows than live theater roles, she said, “Since you don’t get a full sense of the person” as in a live audition. However, an advantage of the new remote audition reality is that when her agency PMA hears of a good role to audition for and she is out of town, she can still tape something and send it in, while in the old days she would have to pass on the job or rush back to New York.

This image is from a Law & Order social media page.

For the recent parole officer role, the producers were looking for “an authoritative person who has been on the job for a while,” she said. Her email came from the show and her agents to put a tape together midday Monday, due on Tuesday, “I got in at 8 p.m. and did it, and by Wednesday, I had the offer,” she said. “They work very quickly.”

The Law & Order episode number was part of Season 22.  “It’s the most efficient set since they’ve been shooting all these years,” she said. “They know what they’re doing, so your time is well-used.”

Markey said that while her dream coming out of Saint Michael’s might have been to make a living just as an actor, she soon learned like so many in her profession do that she needed to diversify to pay the bills. “If I had been able to just be an actor that would have been fine, but I love directing and so started to do that since I needed to work more,” said Markey, who has directed several Saint Michael’s Playhouse shows as well as acting in them.

“Then I started writing, and I have a solo show I did this summer, and now this past year I’ve been working for a couple audio book companies reading those,” she said. Another regular gig that she has enjoyed has been being part of a “loop group” that just “does additional voices in movies – screaming on a roller coaster, for example.” She estimates having done 60 or more movies over a dozen or so years as just a loop-group voice actor, including for one box office hit The Sixth Sense, and “would get the day rate, and then depending on how much money the movie got, residuals after that.”

“I’m like a shark,” Markey said. “I just keep moving.”