Holy hell, boy, Ron Perlman is sitting next to me.
Perlman has one of Hollywood's most recognizable faces. He actually has several of Hollywood's most recognizable faces. In award-winning makeup he has played iconic characters like the title character from the Hellboy comic book franchise, Vincent the Beast opposite Linda Hamilton in the TV series Beauty And the Beast, the Reman Viceroy in Star Trek: Nemesis, the caveman Amoukar in Quest For Fire, and many others.
When it's just his own face, again, the camera has zoomed in on him. He was praised for his turn as a mafia boss in Drive, riding shotgun with Sigourney Weaver in Alien Resurrection, battling Wesley Snipes in Blade II, and especially lately as the popular villain Clay Morrow in the sensationally popular TV series Sons of Anarchy, as well as many other roles on television, in movies, on stage, and his voice in numerous video games and animation projects.
To both draw fans into the BC Northern Exhibition and to draw awareness to Northern Fancon coming in May (a Citizen-BCNE co-production for fans of comics and pop culture in general), Perlman came to Prince George and met the audience on stage for a live interview.
There were two microphones and two chairs out on the BCNE stage, and a good 1,000 people waiting to see this titan of entertainment. Even though I was to occupy one of those chairs, Perlman seemed to fill the whole space even before he walked out to the roar of the crowd. Perlman is known as a teddy bear of a guy, but one of those words is bear. He doesn't suffer fools and I know myself to occasionally be a fool so despite the eye-crossing research I did, trying to get ready for him, I was envisioning all those badass characters coming to life at once on this mere mortal.
It started off with a glint of those beasts just pacing their cage. I mentioned his co-star Kim Coates being in Prince George a couple of months ago. "Who?", he responded deadpan. It was a joke, but it was also power over this interview being established.
I gave his full name, as seen on the online movie database IMDB. Wrong again. His middle name is not Francis and he didn't elaborate.
I mentioned that according to IMDB, there was a Hellboy III in the works. Wrong again. But Perlman was in a mood to elaborate on that point, since it meant so much to the fans of the red-faced demon with a heart.
"They've been announcing Hellboy III on IMDB since before we made Hellboy I," he said, but talked of the cost hurdles and how badly he wants to leap them.
"There's not a lot of appetite in Hollywood to finance it, but I'm fighting for it really hard every day [applause erupted] because I feel the first two movies were basically a setup [in the story]. Watching that play out is something I think we owe the fans because they hung in there for the first two movies and Hellboy III was always meant to be the resolve."
Since my own line of questioning had some potholes, I thought it would be a good idea to share the pain. With the help of BCNE mainstage host Tim Yule, audience members got a chance to ask some questions of their own. Some were simple queries about the common elements of show business, but some were insightful and in every case Perlman took them as an opportunity to give something new. When someone asked about how it was to shoot one of the less applauded films on his repertoire, Police Academy 7, he talked about how it was to shoot in Moscow in the first two years following the collapse of communism. When someone asked him if he was a good shot with a gun, since his Enemy At the Gates character was a sniper, he replied yes but then talked about how Canada has a great tradition of guns being treated as tools and sports equipment but no access to guns in his New York youth unless it was for crime.
Then audience member Leah Coghlan cracked open whatever hard shell he might have been projecting when she asked how he felt about his character Clay Morrow being executed before the final season of Sons of Anarchy.
"Season 6 was really tough for me, I'm not going to lie," he told her. "When they told me I wouldn't make it all the way to the end, that kind of pulled the rug out from under me, because that was my family for six years. Because Clay was such an integral part of the world of that show, like him or not, I was very uncomfortable all that season knowing I was going to buy it prematurely. And the day Clay went down was a very tough day. But six great years, so on balance, who's the lucky guy?"
He talked about spending so many years doing so many characters in heavy makeup and how that took a physical toll. "I'm only 32 years old," he joked.
Then audience members asked him about his big break, the TV show Beauty And the Beast. He admitted he had done so many roles in a row that required his face to be buried in makeup, he refused to even read the script. His manager drove it right to his door and thrust it at him.
"Twenty pages in, I wanted to know who I needed to kill in order to play Vincent because it blew my mind, it just spoke to me on a very primal level. I really understood the character, the world, and I became desperate to win that role, and when I finally did win it, it was one of those too-good-to-be-true moments. Usually things don't go that way for a young actor. That was a very triumphant episode for me, to want something as badly as I did and actually get it. I wasn't used to having that happen."
He credited strong roles and strong directors (Guillermo Del Toro and Jean-Jacques Annaud primarily) for making those times in heavy makeup not only bearable but growth experiences. He was grateful to have his career path make its way to director Kurt Sutter who had Sons of Anarchy in his creative brain. It blew up into a serial drama in the same esteem as House of Cards or Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad.
"Cable television is doing the best work on the planet right now," Perlman said. "It has surpassed even film for having the best storytelling, the most original storytelling, the most dangerous storytelling. Sons of Anarchy is a badass show, and there are others like that. It's where the best writing is. So if you want to be challenged as an actor, which I do, and do stuff that never gets boring and has a dynamic swing to it, then you want to find yourself working in cable television."
He is openly proud about three other projects he called "close to perfect" when he sat back and watched as an audience member: an Oscar-winning short film called Two Soldiers, the indie romantic comedy Happy Texas and the upcoming drama Before I Disappear. He also called on the audience to go see an animated film he helped voice called The Book of Life.
There was another book he made mention of. He has just completed his autobiography. Easy Street, the Hard Way is his look back at a career of a thousand faces, only some of them his own, and all the people who helped shape him along the way. It isn't the act of making a movie or inhabiting a character that moulded who he is as a person, he said, it is the people along the way who have given some of themselves to his own human arch. The book comes out in September.
Perlman, a vino enthusiast, was all smiles when he received as a gift from the BCNE/Fancon organizers a bottle of haskap berry wine craft-made by Prince George's Northern Lights Estate Winery. He held it up like a trophy as the audience roared their appreciation, and then he strode offstage and was gone into the silvery summer evening.
