The aptly-named Death Mountains in the Austrian Alps in the middle of winter seem a lot farther from Washington Heights than just the other side of the planet, but somehow that's just where native New Yorker Ron Perlman found himself filming his latest movie, "Season of the Witch."
"We shot a whole bunch of stuff at night, where we're chasing the witch when she escapes from the cage," says the 60-year-old actor. "And I think we shot that sequence over six nights, culminating in a scene where there's a horrific cesspool, a graveyard of these plague-ridden bodies. And I think the temperature dropped that night to 15 below zero Celsius."
Even worse than the New York blizzard.
It was all worth it, he says, for the chance to work opposite Nicholas Cage on the medieval horror movie about a pair of disillusioned Crusaders forced to transport a teenage girl, suspected of being a witch who brought about the Bubonic plague, to trial.
But how does the son of an electronics teacher and an employee of the City Clerk's office make it all the way out there?
"He just gets really, really lucky," says Perlman. "It's like a Dr. Suess story, 'Oh the Places I Will Go.'"
At Manhattan's George Washington High School, Perlman says, he was just an awkward kid, uncomfortable in his own skin who found a haven in school shows by pretending to be other people.
Outside of school, you could find the teenage Perlman on the basketball court in Inwood Park playing pickup basketball with a young Lew Alcindor Jr., years before his legendary NBA career as Kareem Aubdul-Jabbar.
His dad, forced to give up his career as a jazz musician for electronics once he had a family, pushed his son to follow his dream. Perlman himself wasn't too sure.
"Everybody I knew who was a professional actor had horrific lives: had no money, were eating spaghetti seven days a week in clothes that had holes in them," he says.
Nevertheless, he toiled off-off-off Broadway through the '70s -- and once in a while as a "torch carrier" in a Broadway show. Those lean years weren't all bad -- he met his wife, jewelry designer Opal Stone, while he worked a day job at a friend's boutique in the Village. ("She walked in to buy a pair of earrings and she never left," he says 35 years later.)
The turning point for Perlman came with an add looking for "freaks" to play cavemen in the 1981 movie, "Quest for Fire." The next thing he knew he was on location in Kenya.
That led to two decades of roles that planted him in the makeup chair: a hunchback in "The Name of the Rose," the lead in the cult TV series, "Beauty and the Beast," and as "Hellboy" in two movies.
"Because I was a late bloomer, it took me a long time to be comfortable in my own skin," he says. "The only way I could have functioned as an actor especially in those early days was doing all that mask work, where I got to go so far up field from my own twisted insecurities."
Front and center as the star of FX's motorcyle gang drama series, "Sons of Anarchy," Perlman is over that insecurity.
He's not over New York, though, even though he spends most of his time in LA. The first thing he does after the plane touches down on the tarmac is make a beeline for the nearest Sabretts' hot dog cart. If it's baseball season, and the Yankees are home, you'll find him in the Bronx.
"I will always consider this home and I will always maintain a residence here, " he says. "My wife is a diehard New Yorker. And my daughter (singer/actress/Brooklynite Blake Perlman) is a die-hard New Yorker, and my mom doesn't know how to live anywhere else but here. "
His mother made it down for the celebrity premiere of "Season of the Witch" at the Loews Lincoln Square, beaming at the chance to meet Nicholas Cage, and proud as heck of her son.
"But she still thinks I should find something secure to do if this acting doesn't work out," Perlman says as he walked through his old neighborhood on the morning after opening. "Like a good civil service job."
0 comments:
Post a Comment