Ron Perlman is anxious,
nervous as he walks through the crowded Manhattan streets, his breath coming
in frosty bursts in the cold November air. He shoulders his powerful
6-foot-2 frame past scurrying New Yorkers. For the first time since
Beauty and the Beast premiered on CBS in September, he is about to meet
representatives of almost every major publication in the United States—more
than 30 skeptical TV reporters ready to judge him at a moment's notice.
The last time he met with the press it was an unmitigated disaster.
"Most of the questions were of a negative bent," says Perlman. They
ridiculed the show's concept. They confronted the star: "Do
you think America is ready for this?" Perlman defended his series
by quoting Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. That made the reporters press
even harder. "You're acting like you have a cure for cancer," one
reporter told Perlman. Finally, Ron Perlman lost his cool.
"I think you are missing the boat, pal," he shot back vehemently.
"Everybody put their pens down," Perlman said later. "They thought
fisticuffs were going to erupt at any time."
Now Perlman has to face the press
again. He smooths his jacket, tugs at his tie. At last he arrives
at the "21" Club where the meeting is to take place. The waiters
smile. The hatcheck girl speaks to him. "I love you," she says
as he whisks by. It was the first indication that today everything
was going to be different. The mood had changed. Two life-size
pictures of Ron Perlman were on the wall. Reporters were shaking
his hand. Questions were friendly—"People asked me how it felt to
be on a hit show," Perlman says. "Suddenly, there was a feeling in
the room that we were a hit." Two hours later, when he left the "21"
Club, Ron Perlman knew the meeting had been a fantastic success.
He came dancing out into the New York streets feeling exhilarated.
For the first time in his career,
Ron Perlman is being recognized as himself. He is thrilled by the
accolades, and yet all the recognition has shaken him, forced him to wonder
about the gap in his life—how he has been a star without being a star,
a respected but anonymous performer, a man who has been hidden behind makeup
in his most successful roles: Salvatore, the hunchback, in "The Name of
the Rose," and a prehistoric man in "Quest for Fire."
But those days are over.
Playing the Prince Charming-like Beast has changed that. Although
the series is considered no more than a cult hit, there is an excellent
chance that more people have seen Ron Perlman in any one of its episodes
than have seen him in the sum of all of his previous roles. Vincent,
the Beast, has given Perlman, at 37, what so many actors before him have
yearned
for—not merely fame but that magical, instantaneous gift and curse:
public recognition. And Perlman is scared. "You feel vulnerable
when you are not invisible," he says. And he's having to adjust.
"All these years you act and you
are anonymous, you are just another person, and suddenly you are being
recognized right and left," Perlman says. "It's like a drug, it's
habit-forming, to base your image of yourself on the outside world, on
what you are getting from the press. It's total fantasy, and the
minute you take it seriously you are in serious trouble. It's just
not real."
Ironically, the subject of Vincent, Perlman's torment
and pleasure, was originally anathema to him. Even before he was
offered the job, Perlman issued an edict to his manager, Erwin More, that
he would not take another role in which he had to hide behind makeup.
The ordeals of "Quest for Fire" and "The Name of the Rose" were enough.
"I had explored everything there was to explore," he says dryly, "about
sitting in a makeup chair for five hours a day."
And yet three days after
the edict, he received a call from More. "Are you sitting down?"
Perlman recalls More saying. "I have this project on my desk called
Beauty and the Beast."
Perlman was angry. "I told
him I didn't even want him to mention it again, that I would not even look
at the script. I said, 'Just leave me alone.' So Erwin, who
just hangs on my every word," he jokes, "dropped the script on my doorstep.
Before I had even finished the second act, I called Erwin and said, 'What
do I have to do to play this guy?'"
The guy is Vincent, half man, half
beast, a mysterious character who lives below the streets of New York City.
His face, fangs and flowing hair suggest a lion, but his soothing romantic
voice suggests a poet. For a damsel at home, the man behind this
crippling guise could be the white knight that she has always dreamed of,
a man whose words and deeds promise warmth, safety and solace. He's
a romantic hero in the most old-fashioned sense: his love affair with Catherine
Chandler (Linda Hamilton) is unconsummated and appears likely to stay that
way. And this has turned him, to his amazement, into a sex symbol.
"More than 95 percent of the people
who write to me are women," says Perlman during a break in shooting on
location in Los Angeles's Chinatown. "Their letters are filled with
sexual fantasies. One woman has written to me nine times, each time
it's seven or eight pages. She's created a whole scenario. . . .
Women say that Vincent is the ultimate fantasy lover, someone who asks
nothing in return but gives 110 percent. He evokes deep unconscious
feelings of longing for a connection to someone who understands things
on a very emotional level."
A few weeks later, he is standing
on a sound stage in full prosthetic makeup, which changes the structure
of his jaw into the soft, curved, grotesque lines that we know as Vincent.
The scene takes place in a cave, and to create the atmosphere, special-effects
people blow ice-cold smoke into the cave through huge hoses. Everyone
except Perlman puts on a gas mask. "This stuff can be dangerous,"
he says, "but I can't put a mask over my makeup." When they are ready
to shoot, Perlman dives into smoke, lying on the floor as he waits for
a cue. Suddenly Vincent emerges, snarling and growling and attacking
his foes. "I'd give that growl a 25," he says laughingly during the
break. "It was really menacing."
On the set, his co-workers are
impressed with the intimacy and nobility Perlman projects, given the role's
strenuous technical demands. "You know it takes real psychological
strength to lie there while somebody works on your face," says creator
and supervising producer Ron Koslow. "A lot of people couldn't handle
it."
Perlman now speaks of Vincent in
the most reverential tones. He is almost insulted when someone suggests
that Vincent—like ALF—might someday appear in public at a party, say.
"Never," says Perlman. "I will never take him out. He has so
much heart, so much soul. Playing him is calling upon incredible
introspection on my part, calling upon what is best about humanity.
This guy is so romantic and heroic and poetic, it's like playing Hamlet
every week. This may just be the greatest role of my life."
Where did Ron Perlman get this
inner depth that he conveys each week? Where did he nurture this
gentle side? Playing fairy tales is the last thing Perlman ever dreamed
of, growing up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, the child
of a radio and television repairman and a mother who works for the New
York City Department of Health. It was a world that knew struggle
and survival—a world of hilly streets populated in the 1930s and '40s by
refugees from Nazi Germany. It's the same section of New York where
Henry Kissinger came as a teen-ager. From these humble roots Vincent
now emerges. "The amount that he has had to overcome in terms of
his physical shortcomings and the heights that he has soared as a result
of overcoming them was very moving to me. It was a pain I lived with
daily, a pain of adolescence, that made Vincent easier for me. I
know how he feels," says Perlman. "I was sensitive. . . and a pretty
unhandsome type. I certainly knew that in the beauty-contest format
of life I was falling short. If I was going to take a special place
in life, it was not going to be based on how I looked."
So like so many others, Perlman
turned to acting in high school as a way to become other people, a way
to gain acceptance. His talent was immediately recognized and he
continued acting at Lehman College in New York City and at the University
of Minnesota, where in 1973, he earned a Master's degree in theater arts.
Even then the prospect of becoming a professional actor scared him.
"I had gotten to know a few actors," says Perlman, "and the life style
seemed really insidious—they were very self-absorbed."
Like Vincent, he conquered his
fears of stepping into the limelight. A year later he was hired by
the Classic Stage Company in New York City to perform in plays by Shakespeare,
Chekhov and Pinter, among others. "Discovery is what I was after,"
says Perlman.
Discovery is what he got.
In 1976, Perlman was picked from 1000 actors by Tom O'Horgan, the Broadway
director who had done "Hair" and "Jesus Christ Superstar," to star in a
two-character play called "The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria."
He starred with Alexis Smith in the O'Horgan-directed regional tour of
"Pal Joey." "I was one of these actors who landed wonderfully artistic
projects once a year and then just sat around because nobody ever thought
of me as a commercial property," says Perlman. "I never did soaps.
I never did commercials. I tried, but I never did the things actors
do while they are waiting for the good stuff; I only did the good stuff."
Then Hollywood beckoned with the role in "Quest for
Fire." But his first brush with the West Coast power brokers nearly
ended his career. "I got a tremendous amount of feedback during the
filming from people like Sherry Lansing [then president of 20th Century
Fox Productions] and the producers of the film, who said I was going to
be the next big star and that everybody had faith in me because they loved
my performance."
This is a special type of Hollywood
lingo, a form of flattery that is bestowed on many unsuspecting young performers.
Perlman took it seriously. "I projected that as a successful actor
I would get the amount of attention I had always wanted; all the hip people
would want to have lunch with me; I would no longer have any problems."
And perhaps most important, Ron Perlman believed that with stardom, "I
would no longer have a terrible self-image."
"Quest for Fire" opened at the box office,
but Ron Perlman did not become the next Marlon Brando—or the next anybody
else. "There was no difference: no phone calls, no offers,
people were not jumping through hoops to meet me. I had been set
up and then none of the things they promised came true. I was destroyed."
That was six years ago, in 1982.
During that period Perlman withdrew from the world of acting. "I
was just drained," he says. But the depression lifted almost as suddenly
as it had begun. "It was almost like an exorcism," says Perlman.
"I had been purged. It was like an incredible dividing line between
my childhood and my adult life." In the end, it was an ordeal that
prepared him for the rush of attention he is receiving today.
Ron Perlman is flying high. He has a successful
marriage to fashion-designer Opal Stone, he is the father of a 4-year-old
daughter, Blake Amanda, he has a home in Los Angeles and an apartment in
New York. He has won over his worst critics. He has risen to
a point in his career where he has played everything he wants to play—but
himself. And how does he feel about that? He has agreed to
a final meeting, arriving at a restaurant wearing black pants, a black
shirt and a stylish black tweed jacket. He is charming, eloquent
and handsome, but he does not have the bristling sexuality of the wild
beast that is Vincent. "That's the trap," he says. "How can
I ever live up to this character?"
But he is optimistic. "I'm
balanced now," he says. "I have a wife and a child. I’m happy.
I can handle it." Can he?
Perlman is silent. "It may
seem strange, but I feel as if Ron Perlman still hasn't even begun his
career. And if things go the way they should, I see myself ending
up as perhaps the next antihero—like Jack Nicholson. . . . That will be
the ultimate experiment—to see if anyone is interested," he says, "in my
face."
[End]
From the July 9, 1988 issue of TV Guide
[With sincere thanks to Linda Wong of Honolulu, Hawaii,
for typing this article, and also providing the photo]
