In his ninth-grade year at Eden Prairie High School (EPHS), he attended the closing night performance of the Tony Award®–winning musical, and something sparked. Up to that point, his first year in high school had been focused on sports: He was enjoying them, and the Freshman A football team was really good that year. But in the darkened back row of the brand new Performing Arts Center, he thought to himself: “Oh… I should be doing this…. Up on stage, not in the audience!” Now, more than 20 years later, he’s not just on the stage, he’s commanding it as Harry Potter in the first national tour of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”

Watch Hollywood opening interviews and curtain call.

At the heart of the Harry Potter stories, Skelley said, is a school. In eight shows a week, he thinks about school all the time — especially in his onstage role as a now fully-grown father sending his own child to Hogwarts. And though he’s not a father off the stage (except to his dog Shelby), the play continuously brings Skelley back to his time in Eden Prairie Schools.

“I spent so much time in Eden Prairie,” Skelley said. “What part of it didn’t shape who I am?”

As a resident of Eden Prairie since he was three years old, Skelley began attending Eden Prairie Schools in kindergarten, and his involvement in theater soon followed. In a second-grade star turn, Skelley landed the role of Leo the Lion in “It’s a Jungle Out There,” a musical about a lion seeking the key to happiness. Skelley embraced the kingliness of Leo’s character by asking his teacher if he could sing a solo. There was no such solo, but why couldn’t there be, he wondered? “I don’t know who that confident little person was,” Skelley laughed.

It’s hard to imagine Skelley could ever have lacked confidence when it came to performing. As he moved through Prairie View Elementary, then-Oak Point Intermediate and Central Middle School, he was in plenty of plays and musicals. But when he entered EPHS, he decided to put theater behind the scenes. Football and hockey became the stars of his show — that is, until he saw “The Music Man.” He was so moved by the production he tried out for the winter play, doing double duty with rehearsals and hockey practice until the night of a performance that happened to fall on the same day as a playoff game.

That day, Skelley made his decision: “I knew I’d have to miss the game. We went on to lose that game, so that was my last competitive hockey game and I missed it! But I knew I made the right decision. That felt like the beginning of me becoming more serious about performing.” Skelley went on to be in even more shows, attend drama camp, act in a state theater competition during his junior year (and win highest honors), and leave a distinct impression on his teachers. 

Many of Skelley's former EPHS teachers, including Rolf Olsen (left) and Linda Wallenberg (right) came to see him perform as Harry Potter in "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" in 2024 and 2025

Rolf Olson, who led the EPHS Drama Department for nearly 40 years before retiring in 2019, remembers Skelley fondly. He’s very proud of his former student’s trajectory. “I loved just having a conversation with John,” Olson said. He recalled Skelley’s “absolute desire to know the character” he was portraying, and Olson encouraged him to act on his knowledge and instincts about that character. It was all part of Olson’s work to get kids to trust themselves. 

And Skelley did just that. Olson sees Skelley’s career as a choice of the heart. In high school, Skelley came to Olson to ask for advice about what to do after he graduated. “I know you’d like me to tell you what to do, but I cannot,” Olson told him at the time. “It’s got to be something you know and you decide that’s best for you. Whatever you do, I’m with you 100%.” Listening to that inner call, Skelley pursued a BFA in Acting at the University of Minnesota.

That decision kicked off a long and remarkable career acting on stage, in television and in film. Since 2006, Skelley has appeared in 15 productions at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, including “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “Macbeth,” and he began his “Cursed Child” journey performing on Broadway as the understudy for “the boy who lived.”

That means Skelley has been playing Harry Potter since he was 33, and now at 40, he brings a veteran understanding of the character to the stage. His wife Maren Searle, whom he met in 2008 in a production of “A Christmas Carol,” is now acting alongside him in the traveling show. According to Skelley, his life is pretty sweet. He credits his time in Eden Prairie Schools as the foundation for much of that success.

“I’ve used everything I’ve learned,” he said, “whether it was visual arts or choir, or being part of the plays or drama camp. All of it was a part of that, you know, kind of soup that becomes who you are — the education of not only what is theater, or what is singing and technique, and all of those things, but also how to be part of an ensemble, how to work with other people, how to make mistakes and learn from them, and become a better actor, a better person, a better company member.”

Earlier this year, Olson made a trip to Chicago to watch Skelley in his midwest stop on the “Cursed Child” tour. It’s easy to imagine Olson in the audience, recalling all the times he directed Skelley on stage, in what the former teacher described as an “unbelievably joyful” experience.

Skelley sees his ninth-grade self in the teenage members of the cast. There’s both the fear of jumping into the unknown and out into the world, and the excitement of it. He remembers that younger self, in the back of the Performing Arts Center, watching “The Music Man” in awe. He remembers that younger self wanting so badly to be on stage. And he tells his younger self, “Don’t be afraid.” 

Listen to John's story recorded as a part of our Oral History Project!