A t2 email chat.

Cronos to Blade II, Hellboy to Pacific Rim, your association with Guillermo del Toro has been a long one…

Hannibal Chau (in Pacific Rim) is such a stand-alone character. Hellboy was a standa-lone character, and the Blade was a standalone character. Cronos was our first association and every single time I work with him, he’s asking me to reach for something else and be a different invention of myself. These are the things that you long for as an actor, to be challenged, to be presented with a variety of different forms of humanity to explore.

When the film was offered to you, did you deliberate over your decision or did you say ‘yes’ immediately considering del Toro was helming the project?

I was coming off a real midlife crisis. I had been away for three years, I was not answering my phone, I was completely directionless, I was completely without energy, I was thinking about getting out of the business. Everything that had driven the first half of my life completely died like a camel going on and so there was nothing. And then, out of the blue this package came with a letter and a script from Guillermo del Toro. He changed so much of my life and then I started seeing footage of stuff that we were shooting on Cronos and I said to myself, ‘Wow!’ I loved him from the minute I met him but the levels of admiration grew… he is such an ordinary, humble, sweet sort of a regular guy.

Was there any aspect of Hannibal’s character and personality that wasn’t in the script but you brought in?

Everything about Hannibal that you see on screen was conceived by Guillermo. He told me he wanted this guy to be very theatrical, with a lot of flair.

What kind of preparation did you put in for this role?

Cottage cheese and capers!

You’ve always played characters with a large amount of make-up and prosthetics. Even as Hannibal you have a scar and tattoos. Does all this help your performance or sometimes even hinder it?

Well, there’s nothing that’s ever applied to me in a del Toro movie that is random. The tattoos on my fingers were all birds which means flying fists, which means this was a guy that at one point was a gangster. So, it gave me a back story. Every tattoo had some meaning to it. The scar was because of some sort of thing that happened where I got too close to my money pit, the Kaiju. You know the fallen Kaiju hadn’t quite fallen yet. And the dark glasses were to hide that from the world. It’s like… I don’t have any vulnerability. Because a guy like Hannibal Chau refuses to believe that he’s wrong or weak. So, it was all placed there for me to inform the persona.

PERLMAN & prosthetics

Quest for Fire (1981): Set in Paleolithic Europe, Perlman’s Amoukar had to don caveman prosthetics.

The Name of the Rose (1986): Played a disfigured hunchback and used deformity prosthetics.

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996): Played half man-half animal and had to put on prosthetics to resemble a beastman.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002): Playing the character of Reman Viceroy, prosthetics consisted of foam and rubber.

Hellboy & Hellboy II (2004 and 2008): As the titular demon (in picture), Perlman’s entire body — save for his eyelids — was covered with make-up and prosthetics.

Beauty and the Beast (TV series): Perlman donned full-body prosthetics to play Vincent, a half-man and half-lion-like beast.