"It's cool,"
Ron Perlman enthuses. "It's cool to be involved with Star
Trek. It's a great franchise."
Perlman's physical appearance
might scare anyone not visiting a sound stage. He looks like a tall,
fearsome cross between Nosferatu and a Cenobite (for those devotees
of the Hellraiser films), and he's clad in a form-fitting black
and mother-of-pearl-ish costume.
Perlman will need to
step back before the camera soon, but he agrees to chat for a few
minutes during a lighting change.
"It doesn't
seem to let much oxygen in in a pinch, so I'm breathing out of my
mouth and nose and not much else," Perlman says of his Viceroy
visage.
"I can't take it off until the end of the day. It takes a
couple of hours to put on and the days have been anywhere between
12 and 17 hours, no less than 12 and probably close to 15 on average."
As for the outfit,
"I have almost no mobility in it," he adds. "Almost
everything I do I'm fighting the costume. This is a very unique exercise
in pacing yourself, and I come up short every day. Every night I go
home whipped, really whipped."
Perlman may be whipped,
but he's also quite confident that the pay-off will be a character
that's at once fully formed and otherworldly. In fact, Perlman refuses
to grouse much about the make up or the costume, and for a very understandable
reason.
"I'm no stranger
to having the externals dictate what I do internally," says
the actor.
"There's no
way you can create a character like this until you're actually in
the get-up and look at yourself in the mirror," he says."That
basically is the first clue as to what he walks like, talks like and
what his mindset is, and that dictates everything else. So you do
some generalized homework about the guy's circumstances, but you really
have to wait until everybody puts on you what it is they're putting
on you to create what is not human, but an abstraction."
"The Viceroy
is very mysterious, very unarticulated. He's like an iceberg. You
can only see one-eighth of him, and I like that. I like playing what's
not seen, what's not explained. My attraction to this was that they
asked me. And it flowed from there.
"Every job has
its own appeal," points out Perlman, who's due next opposite
Charles Durning, Carol Kane and Oliver Hudson in the comedy-drama
G-S.P.O.T., then in the Roger Corman action flick Shakedown,
and who also hopes to direct a feature in the near future. "I've
never really thought about a job in terms of genre. I've thought about
it in terms of each individual case as it came. One tries to use all
the colours on the palette. Whenever I see an opportunity to play
something I don't believe I've ever played before and I feel I have
the ability to do it, and I can connect with the character in some
way, that's the attraction."
When asked if he would
be interested in reprising his role in the next ST:TNG feature, assuming
his character survives, Perlman replies,"Well the cool thing
is, I could be in the next Star Trek movie and nobody would know it
was me. But no, I would rather do this one this one time. I've played
a lot of characters that I could play for a lifetime. This one I would
prefer to do as a one-shot."
* * *
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