Kerry Bishé is an American actress who was born in New Zealand. She is best known for playing Donna Clark in the AMC television series Halt and Catch Fire.  

Kerry Bishé Bio: Early Life

Although Bishé was born in New Zealand, she and her family moved to Glen Ridge, New Jersey when she was very young. After graduating from Montclair Kimberley Academy, where her father Kenneth worked as a teacher, in 2002, she enrolled at Northwestern University.

Kerry Bishe Bio: Career

Bishé began touring with a Shakespeare theater troupe in 2004, and played the role of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. 

In 2006, she participated in a 2006 production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and also also acted in a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. 

Bishé’s film debut came in 2007, when she played a minor role in The Half Life of Mason Lake, a low-budget movie. She then played extras in the 2008 film adaptation of Sex and the City and the comedy-drama film The Lucky Ones that same year.

Bishé also played a tiny role in the 2008 black comedy film The Understudy, which starred Marin Ireland, Paul Sparks, Aasif Mandvi and Richard Kind.

Also in 2008, Bishé appeared in the TV movie Night Life, which was directed by Zach Braff. Bishé and Braff collaborated again in 2009, when she played the lead role and narrator Lucy Bennett in the final season (season 9) of the medical sitcom Scrubs. 

In 2009, Bishé made single-episode cameos in the television shows Life on Mars (the American version) and Royal Pains. 

Bishé co-starred with Edward Burns in the 2010 romantic comedy Nice Guy Johnny, an independent film that Burns also directed and wrote. She and Burns reunited for his 2011 comedy-drama film Newlyweds. 

Also in 2011, Bishé played a secondary character in Red State, a horror movie directed by Kevin Smith. In 2012, she played Kathy Stafford in Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning film Argo. Her character was a diplomat who pretended to be a set designer on the crew of the fake movie created in the film.

Bishé and Burns reunited for a third time for the 2012 comedy-drama film The Fitzgerald Family Christmas, which Burns also directed and wrote. Connie Britton and Heather Burns also starred in the film.

In 2013, Bishé starred alongside Elijah Wood and John Cusack in the independent thriller film Grand Piano. 

Bishé’s first major television role came in 2014, when she started portraying computer engineer Donna Clark in the AMC drama series Halt and Catch Fire. Incidentally, she plays the wife of actor Scoot McNairy’s character Gordon Clark on the show, the second time she and McNairy played a married couple after Argo. 

More recently, Bishé appeared in a 2016 episode of the Showtime drama series Billions and in five episodes of season 3 (2017) of the Netflix drama series Narcos. In the latter show, she played Cristina Jurado, the American wife of Colombian cartel money launderer Franklin Jurado.

Kerry Bishe Interview On ‘Halt and Catch Fire’

In 2016, Bishé sat down with uInterview for an exclusive interview on her role in season 3 of Halt and Catch Fire.

The show looks at the early days of personal computers, and particularly traces the rise of multiple startup companies in the tech industry that would change computing for years to come. Among the issues Halt and Catch Fire deals with are online privacy and antivirus software. Bishe’s character Donna Clark is supposedly struggling to balance her professional life with her personal life in season 3, when she finally begins to achieve success in her workplace.

“She has all this unbridled potential, which is exciting and frustrating, and I think we really got to see all of the stages of her recognizing that she had bigger ambitions,” Bishé explained.

Bishé also revealed that she was not very familiar with some of the subjects discussed in the series, so she did some research for her role.

“My brother has a PhD in Bio-Chemistry, and so he set me up with a friend of his who is a computer engineer—among many other things—and I went to his garage in Pasadena, California. And we ordered some Speak & Spells, which is that old eighties toy, off of the internet,” she said. “We like took apart these Speak & Spells so I could see how they work, and we soldered some stuff.”

Bishé also cited some major statistics on gender inequality in tech, and gave her opinion on her character’s position as a member of a predominantly-male industry.

“In 1984, 37 percent of computer science degrees were going to women; in 2012, 18 percent of computer science degrees went to women,” she revealed. “When people ask, “How is it playing a woman in a marginalized career in the 1980’s?” women are more marginalized in that industry today, which is shocking.”

Kerry Bishe Personal Life: Boyfriend, Net Worth, Social Media, Quotes

Bishé has reportedly been dating Chris Lowell, an actor who was on the series Veronica Mars and Private Practice, since 2016.

Her net worth is estimated at $4 million. Bishe is not on Twitter, although she is on Instagram as @kerrybishe, and has 12.4 thousand followers.

Quotes:

“I’m kind of a Luddite myself. I’ve got a bunch of typewriters at home. I’m a big fan of old technology.”

“I was a mime. I’m not kidding. I went to Northwestern University and they have a mime company, so we did a lot of training and then a lot of mime shows around Chicago.”

“I think that some people like to be someone other than themselves when acting, while others are most themselves. I fall into the second camp. For me, acting is a great exercise in getting to the truth about myself.”

Read more about: