Ron Perlman could be mistaken for Will Ferrell’s grumpy older brother. Today, however, he mostly looks trapped. That slab of a face, frosted with a w
Ron Perlman could be mistaken for Will Ferrell’s grumpy older brother. Today, however, he mostly looks trapped. That slab of a face, frosted with a white beard and moustache, seems too formidable to be contained by the narrow vertical frame of his iPad camera. Wearing a stonewashed grey denim jacket over a black shirt, he peers down at me, brow crinkled, as if from a great height. It’s like being on a Zoom call with Goliath.
Though he introduces himself as “Ron from Brooklyn”, the actor, who is a few weeks shy of 75, is sitting at home in Los Angeles. No, the fires didn’t touch him, but the nearest ones were only three miles away, close enough to make him jittery. “Scary times,” he says. His voice rumbles like a freight train. Tom Waits, whom he was once plausibly but falsely rumoured to be playing in a movie, sounds like Charles Hawtrey by comparison.
Lion man … With Linda Hamilton in Beauty and the Beast.
Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy
Perlman has lived in LA since the 1980s, when he was one of the leads in the hit romantic fantasy series Beauty and the Beast. (The Terminator’s Linda Hamilton was the other.) He won a Golden Globe award and received two Emmy nominations for the show. But Perlman’s fame was curiously manageable. He got the best restaurant tables, yet no one knew what he really looked like beneath the leonine disguise he wore for the role. One magazine voted him the sexiest man of the year – in his Beast makeup.
No prosthetics were needed for his up-to-date film, the atmospheric, old-fashioned, black-and-white boxing drama Day of the Fight, in which he plays Stevie, who is training Irish Mike (Michael Pitt) for his latest bout. “When you say ‘old-fashioned’, I mean, sure, no one’s wearing spandex,” Perlman concedes. “But it’s all about friendship and love. Mistakes, victories and failures. To me, that’s not old-fashioned. It’s the kind of movie I could wallow in for days.”
The director is Jack Huston, whose grandfather John made the sweat- and booze-soaked 1972 boxing classic Fat City. Day of the Fight conveys a decent sense of life in a spit-and-sawdust gym, and features some high-calibre cameos (Joe Pesci, Steve Buscemi). The worst you could say is that there’s not enough Ron Perlman in it. But it proves that he has few equals when it comes to evoking an entire existence in a flash. He growls his first line (“Hey asshole!”) and most of the others, which include “Kid, I love ya” and “Get da fuck outta here!”
Leading roles aren’t his thing anyway, unless you count occasional grotesques such as the carnival strongman in the twisted dreamscape of The City of Lost Children (1995), co-directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie), or the horned, tomato-red hero of Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy adventures. Del Toro stood his ground against the studio, which wanted to cast The Rock or Vin Diesel, and modelled the character so closely on Perlman that when the actor flirted with using a different voice, the director said: “What are you doing? Just be Ron Perlman and that will be Hellboy.”
Personality-wise, there isn’t much separating him from his infernal alter ego. “The character’s number one charm is that he’s a bit of an underachiever,” Perlman says. “He’s a superhero who’d rather watch the Marx brothers and play with his cats and eat pizza than save the world. But he does it because the world is a fucking mess. Someone’s got to. He does it reluctantly. And that’s how I do everything.”
If Perlman sees himself as an underachiever, directors don’t agree. Many have kept coming back to him for more. He made three films with Jeunet, the best of which is the cruelly underrated Alien Resurrection (1997). Three with Jean-Jacques Annaud, too, including the ones that launched him as a film actor after a decade in theatre, and established him as the king of performing in prosthetics: first, the prehistoric Quest for Fire (1981), for which a glossary of grunts and growls was specially devised by Anthony Burgess; and second, a chilling adaptation of Umberto Eco’s medieval whodunit The Name of the Rose (1986), in which Perlman’s character was falsely accused of Satanism and burned at the stake.
‘No one’s wearing spandex’ … Michael Pitt and Ron Perlman in Day of the Fight (2023). Photograph: Courtesy of Icon Film Distribution
Spending four or five hours in the makeup chair for these films, and for Beauty and the Beast, led to him being called the Lon Chaney of his generation. It served a psychological purpose, too. “When I was a young man, I was so uncomfortable in my own skin. I was given this gift of putting layers of stuff between me and the real world so that I could free myself to play these characters. Then in my mid-40s, I experienced a kind of détente with my body: ‘Oh, maybe you’re not so bad after all.’”
His relationship with del Toro has stretched from the Mexican auteur’s gory 1992 debut, Cronos, to Nightmare Alley (2021) and Pinocchio (2022), with only the occasional gap. “He has a feel for my skillset, which is limited,” Perlman says. Does he really think that? “Well, I was hoping you might correct me,” he deadpans. When I do, perhaps a fraction too overdue, he perks up: “There you go! I was spearfishing for validation and I got what I wanted.”
In 1990, del Toro, then a special-effects makeup expert, sent him a handwritten fan letter. At the meeting that followed, Perlman witnessed the budding director’s unorthodox approach to dinner. “Guillermo said, ‘I like to start with dessert.’” At the end of the meal came soup. “By the time we stood up, we were like brothers who had been separated at birth.”
‘He does it because the world is a mess’ … Perlman in Hellboy (2004). Photograph: Sony Pictures/Sportsphoto/Allstar
Once shooting on Cronos was finished, Perlman threw a Hollywood bash for del Toro – he calls it his “I’ve found this genius film-maker and I want you all to meet him because he’s going to become one of the greats” party. Hamilton brought along her then partner James Cameron, which sparked an enduring friendship between the Avatar director and del Toro. That means Perlman can be indirectly credited for the moment at the 1998 Academy Awards when Cameron – furious that Harvey Weinstein had sacked del Toro from his second film, Mimic – nearly lamped him with the Oscar he had just won for Titanic. “We all wanted to take a crack at Harvey,” shrugs Perlman.
The closest he ever got was urinating on his own hands before pressing the flesh with the feared producer. Recounting that story on Twitter in 2018 led Perlman into a spat with Donald Trump Jr, who accused him of knowing about Weinstein’s predatory behaviour and yet doing nothing. “I never said I knew Harvey was a rapist,” Perlman shot back. “I did know he was a prick, though.”
It was the start of an outspoken streak that he has only recently reined in. He was the last of the cast members of Sons of Anarchy, the series in which he played the leader of a biker gang, to join Twitter. “They were all saying, ‘Ron, it’s fun!’ I didn’t have any desire to exercise that muscle until the arrival of our 45th – and now 47th – president. I’d grown up in New York so I knew everything there was to know about that snake-oil salesman con-artist. I was so offended to see this guy who’d sell you shitty steak and bad vodka and swampland in New Jersey now emerging in a leadership position. And yeah, it got hot and heavy.”
You sweating yet? … Perlman as Clay Morrow in Sons of Anarchy.
Photograph: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy
You could say that. At one point in 2020, Perlman challenged Republican senator Ted Cruz to a fight online. The actor was still taunting Republicans last summer, when hopes were high for Kamala Harris to take the presidency. He tweeted at Elon Musk: “Yo elon! [sic] You sweating yet?”
He was hardly alone in believing the election would have a happier outcome. How is he dealing with the fallout now? “I was gonna ask you,” he says glumly. “It’s all still as impossible to process as the fires in LA. This is going to have to run its course.”
It’s a long way from Hellboy. But then he offers a glimmer of hope: “I’m spending a lot of secretive time working on my version of counteracting. If I get lucky, I’m going to go back to being very public again.” Political ambitions? “No. A counter-movement.” Wait, what? “If I have anything to announce, I’ll come to you, I swear to God. But that’s all I’m going to say for now, my friend.”
I think back to his description of Hellboy, and how he goes off reluctantly to save the world because it’s a mess. Well, someone’s got to. Why not Ron Perlman?
Day of the Fight is streaming on the Icon Film Channel, and is in cinemas from 7 March
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