The Many Mutations of Ron Perlman

The man behind Hellboy on genre, animation and what he does during long makeup sessions.

Your voice is instantly recognizable in the dozens of animated projects and videogames you’ve recorded voiceover work for. Could you share any insight from inside the booth?

The thing that’s cool about the recording booth is that it’s so perfunctory, so cut-to-the-chase. I really like that every once in a while you’re doing something that you haven’t rehearsed or discussed into the ground. You show up, the script is in front of you, you read it in front of the microphone, and if you mispronounce a word, you go back. Two hours later, you’re back in your car, heading to the next thing in your life. It’s no muss, no fuss and you’re doing it on a purely instinctive level. I always thought that was a great honing device to keep you in that trust place: “Hey man, I can do this. My first instinct is usually the right one.”

Not necessarily specific to what you’ve personally voiced over, but it seems appropriate to ask a man approaching 60: do you like cartoons or video games?

I love great animation. In the top five directors on the planet today is [Hayao] Miyazaki. You can stack up the great Disney films next to anything, the greatest films ever made. Great animation in the right hands is a formidable, beautiful thing. Video games, sometimes they’re just one-dimensional. Everything has the potential to be horrendously utilitarian, and it’s just clear that the only thing anybody’s ever interested in is “How fast can we turn a profit?” It has the same potential to be sublime and amazing. It depends on who’s involved and what the values of the filmmakers are in executing these ideas. When you decide you’re going to do a gig, you’re hoping for the latter. Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of it and say, “Oh my god, I screwed up. I’m in here with a bunch of nincompoops.” For the most part, I’ve been really lucky, working with people who are telling stories from the heart for all the right reasons.

Speaking of, I’d love to hear any anecdotes you might have about actor/filmmaker/producer Larry Fessenden, with whom you worked on “The Last Winter” and “I Sell the Dead.”

He’s one of my favorite people alive. I have nothing but good stories about Larry, but none of them come to mind right now. He’s as unique an individual as exists. I can’t say the two words “Larry Fessenden” without a huge smile coming over my face. Talk about a maverick, somebody who is just totally living in his own unique niche and refuses to be seduced by all that other shit that’s out there. This guy’s the real deal. He can’t be bought, he can’t be paid for, and he can’t be thrown from what it is he’s devoted to. He is as pure as the driven snow.

There was a time in the mid-’90s when I saw you in foreign-language art films. How did that happen?

Americans wouldn’t hire me in the entire decade of the ’90s. I couldn’t get any American to freakin’ hire me. [laughs] So you have to go where the work is. The first job I got in the ’90s was “Cronos” with Guillermo del Toro, and to this day, I don’t know what the hell I was doing in that movie. I don’t speak Spanish, so we fashioned together some sort of modus operandi with chewing gum and spit, and shoved me in there with a shoehorn. It was the beginning, as they say at the end of “Casablanca,” of a beautiful friendship.

How about working with Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro in “The City of Lost Children,” in which you spoke French?

It’s funny because those guys were looking for the character One for over a year, all over Europe. They wanted someone who was a fish out of water, somebody [for whom] French was definitely a second language. He was a real country bumpkin in a very slick, overly sophisticated, very corrupted world. He was like an innocent abroad, to quote Mark Twain. “Cronos,” in fact, was playing at some local horror festival, and Caro went and saw it because he’s such a horror freak. They got the idea to use me from watching “Cronos,” so Guillermo del Toro is directly responsible for my liaison with Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

So the American makes a movie in Spanish to ultimately win over the French guy, that’s amazing.

And then the French guy says, “Okay, your character’s Russian, so I want you to be speaking French, but in a Russian accent.”

Having survived raising two teenagers, did you ever sense there was a phase when it was embarrassing or uncool to have a genre hero for a dad?

I think they slid on that one. My daughter was just a little baby when I started doing “Beauty and the Beast,” and that was kind of a cult classic, so she benefited from that rather than it being an embarrassment to her. It could’ve gone either way. I knew my son was in for the whole nine yards when he started carrying a “Hellboy” lunchbox to school. It has its benefits.

Speaking of “Beauty and the Beast,” you directed an episode and wrote another one. Did you not catch the auteurist bug from those stints?

Oh, I’ve always wanted to direct. I’m not a writer. I didn’t actually write that, but it was an idea that I had based on the Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast.” I thought we should do some sort of homage since it’s one of the greatest films ever made, and no small amount of inspiration to what we were trying to do. But yeah, the directing thing is something I’ve been threatening to do for years. I have a number of scripts I want to direct, but every time I seem to have a hole in the schedule, some acting gig comes up and it’s an offer I can’t refuse, so the whole thing keeps getting moved into the shed. One of these days, Alice.

“Mutant Chronicles” opens in New York and Los Angeles on April 24th.

[Additional photo: "The City of Lost Children," Sony Pictures Classics, 1995]

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