We conclude our coverage of the Montreal Comiccon with our Q&A with Ron Perlman!
No time was wasted; we needed to know Ron’s thoughts about the opening monologue that opens up most installments in the Fallout video games. For him, recording that speech took him no more than thirty minutes of time, and he didn’t even bother to prepare for the job (something he does for all his work, as it turns out), as he wants to achieve an instinctual reaction to the work. Despite being so short, Perlman found and still finds the opening speech to be incredibly well-written, believing that the writer Tim Cain was extremely multidimensional with his work. To this day, he’s amazed and surprised at how influential and iconic the speech is, and that they’ve asked him to come back for later installments of Fallout and to cameo in the show’s second season.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the rest of the panel dealt with Perlman’s tenure as Hellboy and his working relationship with Guillermo del Toro. Perlman considers himself quite lucky to have gotten the chance to play so many empathetic monsters in his career, characters who can’t participate in the normal world but yearn to be normal. Beast, from the 90s television adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, was that guy, and of course, Hellboy is literally a demonic child who was raised to save the world. Perlman loves looking for the humanity within the monsters, as he believes that everyone has a darkness in them. A big inspiration for him was Charles Laughton as Quasimodo in the 1939 film of the same name, where the hunchback is presented as this grotesque character, but he’s really a beautiful person. Perlman would often think of himself as a monster in his youth, so he found solace in roles like that, which in turn inspired him to become an actor himself.
He thinks this is why he loves working with del Toro. Including Pinocchio, the two have worked together on seven projects now, and del Toro is seemingly obsessed with finding the humanity in the monster. The two are great friends, not just collaborators. Case in point: a fond memory with del Toro was both of them singing some Barry Manilow, something I wish I could’ve seen for the laughs. That sounds wild.
So what was Ron Perlman thinking when he first teamed up with del Toro for Cronos? Since it was an older movie and an indie movie on top of that, it would take around one week for the crew to get the dailies back, so for the first few days of filming, everyone was in the dark as to what this movie would actually look like on film. Once they finally got their first look at the footage, Perlman’s reaction was pretty to the point: “holy fuck, this is going to be a guy who leaves an amazing body of work”. Just from that one frame, Perlman knew, and he wasn’t wrong. He cites that his relationship with del Toro amounts to the two being opposite sides of the same coin, he being the interpretive artist to the writer/director. He believes that del Toro loves writing weird small parts for Perlman and that the two have become something of brothers over the years and sees the director as his creative muse.
When Blade II was greenlit, one of the first things del Toro did was call Ron Perlman and offer him the role of Reinhardt. Perlman, of course, accepted, even though there was no script or even backstory for the character. Since Reinhardt wasn’t a main character, a lot of his characterization and traits were developed on the fly during the film shoot.
Despite the popularity at the time, there wasn’t too much talk of his time in Sons of Anarchy, but the show at least did get brought up. When asked how it was working with real Hell’s Angels members when prepping for the role of Clay, and if he was ever stressed or afraid of being so close to them, he cited that they were some real gangsters, some heavy duty cats, but at the same time, they were so helpful, kind, and even loving that he never felt afraid or stressed when with them. They approved of SoA and were very eager to help contribute to the show to help in its authentic portrayal of motorcycle club/gang culture.
He also had a kick diving into a fun little anecdote from Alien: Resurrection, specifically that infamous basketball scene. He confirmed that the scene was done in one take, and that Sigourney Weaver practiced that shot for months in advance. But because it was a fluke of a shot and they got it on one take, they didn’t exactly want to redo it. But they were considering it because Perlman made a stupid face on camera after seeing the shot Weaver made. He said he more or less was shitting himself silly with how awesome the shot was, and he was freaking out on camera, much to the frustration of the director and producers. They needed to keep the shot but cut his dumb reaction from the movie. That’s why there’s an abrupt cut to Perlman’s character’s face in the scene, to cut away from his true reaction.
Perlman then got pretty serious as he wrapped things up, talking about how people have gotten far too tribal these days and that different opinions don’t seem to be tolerated. He thinks we need more culture in order to come together, as art celebrates our humanity. He then got pretty livid at the AI scene and the tech bros coming for our culture and taking away our humanity. He believes those in power want to be in control of us, and by taking away the beauty of art, whether that be poetry, music, or film, we are losing our identity. You can’t put a price on the beauty of art, meaning those people can’t make a profit off the beauty of humanity and that scares them. “Fuck you, you robotic motherfuckers at the top,” he lambasted to applause.
And that concluded the panel with Ron Perlman, as well as our coverage of the convention this year! We hope you enjoyed our articles, and we’d like to thank not only the guests, but the organizers for all their hard work. Until next year!
