by David Lobato, Reporter, and Jayden Leggett, Editor

After his long walk from the back of the venue, a seemingly confused Ron Perlman wasn’t initially sure what was expected from him for this panel. “My pubes are about to go on fire. Who put this heater here? I complained yesterday that it was cold and now they’re trying to burn my dick off!” With this delightful introduction out of the way, and after threatening to start singing some musical numbers from The Sound Of Music, the audience questions soon began.

With all of your time working with prosthetics and makeup, what do you while you are sitting in the makeup chair?
“Groan, roll a couple of doobies… nah, there’s always music playing. Probably a 90-10 split. 90% Sinatra, 10% what the other makeup artists want to hear. I’ve been really lucky to work with some of the coolest dudes that every came down the pipe when it comes to special effects makeup. I just love being in their presence and so we really use that four hours in the morning to just shoot the shit and have a great time and gossip about what’s happening in production, what’s not happening in production, what should be happening, what you wish was happening, what you wish wasn’t happening.

Once in a while we’ll watch a movie, you know, we get through the time, and I’ve just had a ball working with these amazing artists which I’ve always marveled at the depth of their skill. So they get to do their magic so that I can get ready to go on and, well, I don’t wanna say do mine, but I mean come on, look at me.”

“WOAH!” [Perlman gets startled by his apparently grotesque image in the projected screen behind him].

Can you tell us about your part in Pacific Rim and how good the film is? “I play a character called Hannibal Chau. I don’t think that I was meant to play that role, I think that was meant for some small Asian person. And then all of a sudden Guillermo del Toro said ‘I want this guy to be totally, totally full of shit – I know, Ron Perlman!’ So by having a big Jew from Brooklyn play a guy who calls himself Hannibal Chau, there is a layer of theatricality that has been put in place upon this character which hopefully puts another dimension to him. But he’s very theatrical, he’s completely self-invented, he does this because he’s a larger-than-life kind of very hedonistic guy who basically worships at the shrine of the accumulation of untold amounts of wealth.

He has allegiances to nothing other than to making money. He has no political affiliations, no idealistic aspirations, no loyalty to people, family, or anything. We find him in this world, it’s kind of a war zone, but it’s a war zone not for countries but for the world itself. So he’s a war profiteer, he’s making all of this money on the backs of other people’s horrible misfortune. He’s a completely different color as a character than anything else in the film, you could almost say you could call him comic relief. He’s actually somebody I delight in thinking about, he’s one of the characters that I’ve really had a great time playing.

I just watched the movie a few days ago for the first time. The movie’s fantastic, and I don’t say that about a lot movies that I’m in, but this is Guillermo del Toro at his absolute best, and there’s an awful lot to look at.”

With the character of Hellboy, was that a role that you fit into easily or did it take time for you to get into character? “The role was really easy because Guillermo, he read the Hellboy comics. Hellboy only ever speaks in like one word sentences or two word sentences, so he had a persona but he didn’t have much of a personality, because it’s a comic book and you get away with this kind of aura. Whereas in the movie they needed to develop this guy so that he had a full-blown personality and tastes and things that he got to do, things that he didn’t get to do. Guillermo del Toro made him sound like me, so he was easy to play, aside from the fact that physically he’s kicking ass.

By the way, I apologize for all of my language earlier now that I realize that there are children in the room. In our country we have this thing where you put a dollar in the jar every time you say a swear word in front of a kid, so I’m gonna give you a hundred now, that should cover me.”

Apart from Alien Resurrection, Blade 2, Hellboy, what sort of character do you prefer to play, hero or villain? “He just needs to be interesting. He or she, by the way, because I’ve now added a woman to my resume. Sometimes the bad guy is the most interesting guy in the piece. I’m really fascinated by people who are wired in a way that is very unique and original. There’s an intelligence to them that makes me desperate to spend time in analyzing what it is that makes them tick, how they think, what their modus operandi is, what their obsessions are. Those are the things that are most interesting to me as an actor. Sometimes that’s the bad guy and sometimes that’s the good guy, very rarely is it anything in between. I just seem to generate characters that are extreme in one way or another. I try not to repeat myself to often, I’m very obsessed with trying to play everything once in my life before it’s all over with, which is why when I had the opportunity to play a woman, that was one thing to check off the old bucket list. And I’ll never do that again, I promise you.”

Do you think the movie Five Girls was underrated?
“No it was definitely not underrated! However bad it was rated it should have been. It was a really low budget movie with um… uh… a lot of people you’ve never seen since. And I was almost one of them. Some things you do for the rent come back to haunt you. Anyway, I apologize for Five Girls, any of you who haven’t seen it, make sure you keep it that way.”

Can you tell us a little bit about the new comic movie that you’re involved with called Elwood with Louis Mandylor?
“Yeah Louis’ a very dear friend of mine, and he created this world, a kind of parallel universe. Really interesting, really cool visually. Elwood is this place you go to when you mess up on Earth, and so you are sort of relegated to this parallel universe where you have an opportunity to either set things right, or if you don’t have the ability to set things right you stay in Elwood and never get out. I play this bulldog named Louie, he’s like this Mafia guy, tough guy, very powerful. We’re looking for a home for that project so there’s not much more to say about that until we find one.”

What’s it like working with Kurt Sutter?
“Hard! [pause] I shouldn’t leave it at that should I? Kurt is a brainy guy, he created a world that certainly seems to be resonating the world over. Every place I go I’ve never been involved in a project that people feel so strongly about, people really feel strongly about Sons of Anarchy. So it’s been a bit of a game changer for me and it’s a gig that I really, really dig. I’ve made some amazing friends doing it, I’ve had some amazing opportunities because I was associated with it that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. It’s a huge chapter in this sordid little life of mine, and fortunately we still have a little bit more time to go and see how this thing plays out.

Kurt Sutter is the genius behind it all, he had an amazing idea to take the pseudo-structure of Hamlet and kind of updated it and turned it in to the world of a motorcycle club. And it works, so thank you very much Kurt Sutter. I apologize for what I said about you earlier… not really.”

Did you do any research with motorcycle gangs before you played your role in Sons of Anarchy? “Yes, that was one of those things that required research, because what was important to all of us, starting with Kurt Sutter, was getting this right. Very often you see these motorcycle movies and TV shows that are just superficial and one-dimensional, there’s no depth to them. Just spittin’, scratchin’ bike ridin’ dudes who have a certain way that they behave amongst each other. For us it was important to find the reality, find the everyday kind of feel for why these guys become who they are, what is it that they have allegiances to, what is it they have loyalties to. The code of the outlaw is probably sometimes even more well-articulated than the society code in general. In the case of the motorcycle clubs, the codes are really specific. Most of these guys are rejecting something that they don’t see in society, a kind of a loyalty to family that they don’t see enough of in society so they create their own subculture. They are almost like nations of themselves with their own autonomous ways of supporting themselves and staying as far away from the grid as is humanly possible.

It was really important for all of us to understand the mindsets, understand the common thread that goes through the hearts and minds of motorcycle clubs the world over, before we created our own. So we all did an inordinate amount of reading and exploring. Kurt even spent three months living with the Hell’s Angels regional chapter. He made it very clear that we were going to try to do something with respect, that wasn’t going to be gratuitous, that we wanted their blessing, we wanted their cooperation, we wanted their respect and that we were going to take this thing and be as respectful to it in return. We’ve had nothing but positive feedback.”

Did you have any idea who Hellboy was before the role?
“Well Guillermo is a real comic book freak. Guillermo’s not only a comic book freak but he’s also got one of the most important private collections of comic book art and first edition comic books on the planet. So he’s really versed in this world. His favorite, favorite comic book ever is Hellboy. So he became obsessed that if he was ever going to do a comic book movie, it would be this one. He had a very personal reaction to the character itself, he had an amazingly huge amount of respect for the work of Mike Mignola (who created the Hellboy comic) and his artistry.

He took me to a comic book shop about eight years before we ever got the green light to do Hellboy, and he introduced to it. He showed me this bust, he showed me a couple of comic books, he said ‘This is my favorite comic book, if I was ever going to make a comic book movie it would be this one, and if we lived in a just world (which we don’t) it would be you playing him.’ It took him eight years to make this little dream of his become a reality.”

What is the possibility of Hellboy 3? “I’ve got a friend of mine who used to say about my golf game: ‘As long as planes can fly, there’s hope.’ When we walked away from Hellboy 2 nobody wanted to make Hellboy 3, it was just really hard, it kicked the shit out of me and Guillermo, and we figured we were done with it. But with the passing of time you forget about that and you just remember the bright spots and the positive parts, and it started dawning on us that we asked the fans to invest in two movies, with the promise that they would find out what the destiny of this character was, whether he was truly going to destroy the world or if he was going to honor his obsession that he was nurtured for to be a force of good. Which of these two things would finally play themselves out in this ultimate struggle that would take place in the third film.

I began to become very kind of rested at the idea that we needed to finish this promise that we made to the fans, so I started a long discussion with Guillermo, who fundamentally agrees we should make it, but it would have to be incredibly expensive, because it’s the end of the world or this very apocalyptic kind of conclusion that’s twice as expensive as the first two movies put together. And finding a studio, frankly to get behind something that was never a blockbuster, it never lost money but it didn’t make like Avengers money or Iron Man money. That’s a heavy risk. So like they say in, was it Peter Pan? ‘Close your eyes, think pleasant thoughts, click your heels’ – oh wait that’s The Wizard Of Oz. Anyway click your eyes and close your heels and who knows, maybe with the good vibes in this film we can make Hellboy 3 happen. Let’s all hold hands!

What was it like to making Drive and working with Nicholas Winding Refn?
“Phenomenal. Everyone who was in Drive (trust me when I say this, this is not an exaggeration), except for Ryan Gosling who owned the rights to the story (since he was the one who put everything together, he was the one who actually got Nicholas Winding Refn to agree to directing the movie), everyone else that you see in the cast all kind of knew this guy from his movies like the Pusher trilogy etc. and all felt like ‘Holy shit man, this is one of the coolest film makers on the planet right now’. The news started to hit that he was going to make his first foray into American cinema and literally I got the part because I begged for him to consider me to play the role of Nino, same thing with Albert Brooks, same thing with Carey Mulligan… because they just said ‘Please let me work with you’ and he’s the kind of guy who goes ‘Well if you’re that enthusiastic then the chances of you being good in my movie are pretty decent’ so that’s how this company of actors came to do this film.

He’s a guy who, you know you’re in the presence of a real artist, you don’t know how or why but you just know, Guillermo del Toro is that way, and Nicholas Winding Refn is that way where you have a kind of feeling about them. So when you asked me what it was like, it was really cool. The fact that the movie turned out as poetic as it did is because he shoots a lot of stuff, and he sculpts it all away until he has this beautiful little polished gem that’s not very long (it’s a short film) but there’s no fat on it, it’s all just really lean. He was born to direct movies and to be able to say that I was in one of his films is one of the greatest bragging rights for me. I would do whatever he asked me to do. If he asked me to be in another movie, he’s one of those guys where I wouldn’t even have to read the script, I would just say ‘Tell me where I need to be, tell me when and I’m there’. So yeah, he’s extraordinary.”

Was the kitten it the subway Guillermo’s way to humanize Hellboy? And can we expect to see you riding in Sons Of Anarchy with a kitten on the handlebars?
“Yes, and no! When you see those beautiful, magic things in Guillermo del Toro movies, it’s all del Toro. When you see the posters for Pacific Rim and you see the TV commercials you’ll see these giant behemoth Godzillas fighting these giant robots and you think “Oh I’ll just be watching another silly blockbuster movie”. Then you go see it and you see these little details like when a character realizes that he has received something that has made him so human and so endearing, that’s del Toro, and del Toro is probably one of the most complex minds that works in cinema right now, because he’s able to see this epic struggle, but he’s able to also see the intimacies of why we should be concerned about that epic struggle. Real intimacy, real vulnerabilities, so in Pacific Rim when you think you’re going to see something else, what you’re seeing is people you know, that are beautifully depicted because they have things like just a love for cats like you find in Hellboy, that was all Guillermo. He’s got a beautiful soul and we’re lucky that that’s what he does, which is make movies.”

What was acting like going from screen to animation voice acting like in Tangled?
“Well on Blade II I worked for five months, on Tangled I worked for fifteen minutes. Or you know, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, maybe an hour and fifteen minutes for my entire performance on Tangled, which if you ask me why I do so much voice work, that’s why. I love doing the voice work, I love showing up, you don’t have to shave, you don’t have to take a shower. You just sit in a booth with a microphone and they say ‘Action’ and you give this huge performance and they go ‘Great, you can go home now’.

What attracted you to the part of Slade in Teen Titans?
“What was it that attracted me? They asked. Pretty much all the work that I do, I do because somebody asks me to do it and I go ‘Yeah sure, what time? Three o’clock Tuesday, I’ll do that’. I really, really like to be busy. I really, really like to work. I really like acting. The more outlandish the challenge the happier I am. The people who work in cartoons are very imaginative, very brilliant people. Sometimes they’re a drag, sometimes they stink but that’s the same with everything.

Andrea Romano, she’s the voice director for Warner Bros. cartoons, she gave me my very first cartoon job, on a show called Bonkers back in the early nineties, maybe the late eighties. I began to fall in love with the idea of doing these cartoons with a lot of brilliant voice over actors that I started out with who are here at this convention like Bill Farmer and Rob Paulsen and those guys, those guys are phenomenal. They called me to do Teen Titans and it was supposed to be maybe an episode or two and it turned into this series that went, what, four or five or six years or something?”

What were the most uncomfortable prosthetics?
“Well, they all had their moments, you know, when you get wet, when you get bloody, when you’ve been in it for seventeen hours and it’s 117 degrees outside, they’re all uncomfortable. Unless I really love that character that I was playing, I’ve never had to make a living at getting dressed up and doing something that was truly horrible and ridiculous. That would be awful, if you go through all that for a character that you don’t respect. So, whatever discomfort that there ever was, however much of an annoyance there ever was, however many times there were where we’re working on our twenty-second or twenty-third hour, I will never stop knowing that there’s an awful lot of people that wish they were me, and there’s a whole lot of worse ways to make a living, and I’m one of the luckiest guys on the planet. I get to play these characters, so whatever you go through is never a drag, it’s always an honor.”

What was your all-time favorite character to play throughout your career? “I could never answer that question, because there are many happy, funny moments, I could never think of one. I couldn’t pick a character but I will because you were nice enough to ask. The circumstances around Hellboy… if I had to pick one guy that kind of represents the magic of what can happen to a person… is Hellboy. The struggle that Guillermo mounted on on behalf of the character for a really expensive movie that was a franchise for a studio, I’ve never witnessed that in Hollywood, where one guy stood up and said ‘I’m not doing this movie unless you do it with this guy [Ron Perlman]’, I’ve never seen that. People don’t have that kind of commitment, people don’t have that kind of loyalty to an idea or another human being. They just don’t, its just too expensive, it would cost them too much of their own skin, so I was the recipient of a rather extraordinary piece of generosity.”

City of Lost Children, can you tell us about your experience with that? “It was one of those ‘Pinch me I’m dreaming’ kind of things. I have no idea to this day, I really don’t quite understand why I was in that movie. A completely French production with nothing but French actors and directors, shot in France for French people, in French. I guess what they were looking for was somebody who was uncomfortable in this sort of decaying world, who is out of place, like a country bumpkin kind of thing, like a fish out of water. They were looking for a foreign actor, a French man would have seemed too comfortable in the role.

It just so happened that the movie Cronos was playing at this horror film festival in Paris. So once again the association between Guillermo del Toro and myself situated me in a place where I wouldn’t have normally been thought of. I met with them and I read this incredible script, City of Lost Children was one of the most amazing scripts I’ve ever read. It took me about a week to read it because it’s so weird and confusing and has a logic completely of its own, and I’m dyslexic so I don’t read so good anyway. We met and they said this role is yours if you want it and I went [jaw drops] ‘Really?’”

With regards to the dramas coming out of the US like Homeland, House of Cards, Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy, I was wondering if you had a view on what some consider to be the golden age of television? “That’s a great question, and it’s true. There’s always been great writing and it just seems to move into different places and a lot of it has to do with market forces. The theater used to be the place where all the great writers went and wrote for, and then the cinema became the place that replaced the theater because great writers were able to get greater exposure. And then market forces just evolved and evolved and evolved, and now the place where great writers are able to really sell original ideas and do things that are interesting and unique is in cable television. Which is kind of a new thing, you know?

The network that I’m on, FX, is only kind of like ten years old and all of the places that are showing the shows that you named, they are all out of young networks. They didn’t exist fifteen, twenty years ago. So they are desperate for programming but they are also desperate for programming that gets people’s attention, which needs to be bold and expansive and original and controversial. So the great writers who write that way and always have wrote in that way, that’s where they are flourishing right now. It’s truly remarkable what is happening, it is like a renaissance in television, but it’s a form of television that didn’t even exist twenty years ago.”

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