The Asher and Hellboy star
Ron Perlman recalls six of
his finest momentsANY ACTOR’S CAREER can be
boiled down to a few moments; those times
when a scene is elevated or transformed
by the choices they make. With over 250
credits to his name, Ron Perlman has more
moments than most to choose from, but we
still managed to whittle it down to six, and
asked him to talk us through them.THE NAME OF THE ROSE (1986)
Wrongly condemned to burn at the stake,
Perlman’s hunchback, Salvatore, bursts
into a lullaby, ‘Ninna Nanna Sette E Venti’...“That is me singing. When we were rehearsing
lighting the fire, Jean-Jacques Annaud was
describing how the fire would come up. I said,
‘Wouldn’t I blow on it? It’s a bright, shiny
object.’ Then somebody came up with that
lullaby, which is a real lullaby, and I learned
it and sang it. It was one of those moments
where we all looked at each other and went,
‘It’s not what we intended to shoot, but that’s
our scene.’ It’s why we do this, the surprises.”Perlman’s
Greatest
Hits ASHER (2019)
In this thoughtful, contemplative
thriller — known in the UK as
the clunky and misleading Hitman:
Redemption — Perlman’s hitman,
Asher, has a heart to heart over
dinner with the woman he’s falling in
love with (Famke Janssen). One
problem: he just killed a guy in
the toilet...
“When he says, ‘I just killed a guy in the
bathroom,’ the audience knows he did,
but to her he’ll say anything to get laid.
There’s a kind of a wit in the writing
that I don’t see much of anymore these
days. It made me say, ‘I have to be in
this movie.’ And in that little exchange,
it pretty much encapsulates everything
you need to know about both these
characters and why they find each
other. It’s so deliciously poetic and
witty and theatrical and understated,
un-didactic.”