While actor and model Taylor Kinney has been in the public eye for years, it would be easy for celebrity tabloid readers to know him solely for his 10-season (and counting) run as Lieutenant Kelly Severide on NBC’s popular “Chicago Fire” or his past relationship with Lady Gaga. Kinney is, after all, rather private compared to many celebs. But Kinney — who hails from Amish country, attended a Mennonite high school, and has a background in carpentry — is anything but your average Hollywood heartthrob. The actor did not start acting until his mid-20s, has an intense amount of hobbies, and is an adrenaline junkie. In between shooting his own scenes, surfing, and riding motorcycles, Kinney does crossword puzzles (in case you were trying to box him in).
Kinney’s acting career started with the nighttime soap opera “Fashion House” back in 2006, and he has been working consistently ever since. In addition to “Chicago Fire” and its various spin-offs, on which he has also appeared as Severide, Kinney’s other television credits include playing an EMT in the medical drama “Trauma,” a werewolf on “The Vampire Diaries,” and one of Fiona’s short-lived dalliances on “Shameless.” In film, Kinney’s most notable credits are the war thriller “Zero Dark Thirty,” where he played a DEVGRU operator in the Navy, and “The Other Woman,” where he played the charming brother of one of the main characters. Here are some untold truths to help you learn a bit more about the charismatic, handsome, and outdoorsy Taylor Kinney.
Kinney was not an actor in high school
If you thought that Kinney’s muscular frame suggested he may have been an athlete at some point, then you were correct. The buff star reportedly grew up playing volleyball for his high school — Lancaster Mennonite School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania — and was so good that the Daily Mail once claimed he was a local “hero.” “Taylor was one of our best volleyball players. He was in the team with me,” former teammate Eric Kinnel told the Daily Mail. “I remember he took the team to district playoffs. He had a great senior year.”
According to acting superintendent Miles Yoder in the same article, Kinney didn’t pursue drama as a high schooler, instead focusing on sports and religious studies. It was not until he was a sophomore in college that Kinney began to explore acting (per USA Today). In a 2012 interview, Kinney told the newspaper that the theater class he chose as an elective “held my interest outside of the classroom more so than any other subject I’d ever taken.” Still, it would be a few years before Kinney would make it to Hollywood.
He was a boxer in college
Acting was not the only thing Kinney began to explore in college, as it turns out that he also took up a new sport — boxing. Kinney’s initial interest in boxing was at least partially developed years before, when he bonded with his grandfather over the sport as a child. “My grandfather was a big boxing fan,” he told Assignment X in a 2013 interview. “… you would see a fighter in the sixth, seventh round start to get fatigued, and then you’d cheer for this fighter and you can get carried away without a firsthand experience of what that’s like in a ring in the seventh round.”
In the interview, Kinney likens his time training as a boxer to his training to play a firefighter in “Chicago Fire,” which makes sense, as both fighting and firefighting require a great deal of energy and endurance. “I started out doing three-minute rounds and by the end of that third round, you could barely put your hands up,” Kinney said of his early memories in the ring. “It’s the same thing with a firefighter. I’d look at it and say, ‘I really want to do that. And I could do that.’ And then the first onslaught of an experience training, you realize how difficult it is and how much training they have.”
Kinney attended college at West Virginia University — which is a four-hour drive from where he grew up — but never graduated. According to USA Today, the actor left after his junior year, when he decided to head to Hawaii. “I wanted a life experience of my own,” he told the newspaper. Kinney stayed in Hawaii for a year before heading on to Tinseltown to start his acting career.
While in Hawaii, the adventurous Kinney took up a number of new hobbies, including surfing and skydiving. He still surfs, as evidenced by photos on his Instagram account — though his last photo in a wetsuit was posted in May 2020. A YouTube fan account also posted a video of him walking shirtless with a surfboard back in September 2020. We know Chicago — where Kinney lives while filming his hit TV show — is cold half the year, but we hope he found some time to ride the waves on the beach in summer 2021. Or maybe he finally got the wave pool that he posted about wanting back in 2012 (via his Facebook).
Kinney had to make money in between all of the surfing and fun while in Hawaii, and so he decided to frame houses to earn cash (per USA Today). This was a logical job for him, as he already had a background in roofing from his youth. “I spent a lot of summers on roofs and framing and I like to see my work,” Kinney told Assignment X. “I like to sweat, I like to use my hands.”
Like boxing, Kinney feels that roofing helped prepare him to take on the physically demanding role of a firefighter. He told the blog Talking with Tami that he is used to dealing with heights from his previous construction work, and so shooting physical scenes that require him to be far off the ground don’t faze him. “I always enjoy it,” he said. According to the interview, Kinney was at one point rigged as high as 20 stories up from ground level.
Kinney’s affinity for heights has come in especially handy, given his tendency to do his own stunts on “Chicago Fire.” “I like doing it,” he told Talking with Tami. “But I will do as much as NBC lets me. Until ‘Captain Insurance’ won’t let me.” In a different interview – this one with Entertainment Tonight – Kinney confessed that filming outside during the frigid Chicago winters was far more difficult a dilemma than the stunts themselves.
But just because he likes doing the stunts does not mean that there was not an adjustment period for Kinney. When discussing the “Chicago Fire” pilot episode with Entertainment Weekly, he admitted that there was a learning curve in terms of doing the stunts while also delivering dialogue. “There was a scene that we shot where I was repelling into the lake,” he told the magazine. “I remember not having a clue what the hell I was doing … I’m running my dialogue, and it just felt so bizarre and silly.”
