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fajrdrakoLance Henriksen.
He's an actor. Born in 1940; I first noticed him in the late 1980s and early 1990s (i.e, in Hard Target, with Jean-Claude Van Damme), and he looks much the same. I've always been intrigued by him, while knowing almost nothing about him. So I went to his panel on Sunday afternoon at FanExpo.
He was articulate, interesting, and stunningly intelligent. I have no reason not to believe his story of his life, but it resonated like fiction. He has been in something like 200 movies, video-games and TV shows, mostly horror and action films. You might know him from his lead role as Frank Black in Chris Carter's TV show, Millennium.
What most came across to me was his strong sense of self: he knows what he wants to do, what he wants to be, and he does it.
The first question was whether it was true he learned to read late in life. It was, he said. He started to go to primary school in New York, hated it bitterly, and left after a few years, supporting himself as a shoe-shine boy. His mother was a waitress. He referred later to 'many stepfathers who were mean to me. I knew my revenge would be outliving them." Not wanting to go home much, he discovered cinema in the days when they didn't kick you out of the theatre after one showing of a movie. He watched many, many movies, fascinated by the world they represented. He knew it was fiction: he loved the storytelling. At one point he saw a biopic of Mario Lonzo: "It was the entire story of his life in an hour and a half. I wan't my story to be longer than that. I wanted to do a thousand stories." He wanted to act.
He didn't get a part till he was thirty, though. He'd then been a sailor for about 14 years, and when in New York, saw a notice for an audition for a Eugene O'Neill play about a sailor. His only worry was that they'd want him to read the script aloud, and he knew that once they saw how illiterate he was, he'd never get a part.
They said, "You certainly look the part. We'll have you do a cold reading of the script."
He said, "By the way, I can also build sets. I've had a lot of experience in carpentry and design."
They said, "Great. Let's hear your reading."
He said, "By the way, I can also do your lighting. I know a lot about lighting, and after being on ships, I've no fear of heights."
Eventually they gave him the role without his reading a word. "I had a shuffle going already. I was ready for acting; I was a good liar. This must give at least a third of this audience hope. Why should I have to learn to read? I didn't want it to ruin my innocence."
He never did read the script. He got an audio recording of the play. Not sure what part he'd been given - having no idea it was the lead role - he simply memorized the entire play.
And from then on, he was a professional actor. He was asked what roles he'd wanted, but never got. "The roles for twenty year olds."
He talked about his role of Jesse Hooker in 1987's Near Dark, a vampire western: "It was an incredible script, it read like T.S.Eliot." He said that was also why he took a role in Aliens: "The first line of the screenplay was, Space like the love of God, cold and remote."
He talked about preparing for his role for Near Dark. He had his fingernails painted, shaped and then broken off at the end "so it looked as if my bones were coming out of my fingers." He lost weight - "I was down to 140 pounds. That was a mistake. I lost so much muscle tone, I put out my back stepping up to my trailer. My boots were too heavy boots."
To get to the studio, he drove across the desert at night. He picked up a hitchhiker, and kept in character as the vampire. He asked him to roll him a cigarette, then threw it out the window. "You call that a cigarette?" He asked him to put on some music on the radio. "You call this music?" They got to a gas station in the middle of nowhere, and the poor hitchhiker decided it was where he needed to be. "I had the character then. Jesse looks at everyone and they're nothing to him but a meal. That was it. I didn't even realize it. It was inside me. The narrative will take care of itself."
He explained how he got the role of Frank Black in Millennium. He hated television - "I'd done it before. It was like I was fart-catcher to Mr. T. Never again." Chris Carter had put a note under his hotel room door once asking him to be in X-Files, but he ignored it. A few years later, his agent gave him a script by Chris Carter, about this character, Frank Black. It was written for him. Perfect. "I wanted to play Frank Black - who wouldn't? But I smelled a rat. I asked my agent if it was a movie. He admitted it was a TV show. It was a bit of a seduction, both ways." He was disappointed by his reprise of the role, when Frank Black appeared on X-Files: "I fought a zombie. Anyone could have done it."
Whenever someone left the room, Henriksen commented on it: "Am I boring you?" or "Lost another one." At one point he interrupted himself to say: "There's a man with a chainsaw walking through here." It was that kind of convention. At another point when someone left, he looed at the package they were carrying: "Is that a bomb?"
He talked about his movie role as Torquemada, filmed in Italy. "It was a very dark experience. A Dominican monk came to the set. I asked him why the Church had tolerated someone as terrible as Torquemada. He said, 'He was a very important theologian.' I almost kicked him. Later, I visited Rome, and saw some priests at St. Peter's. I hated them, and realized the role was getting to me. It was such an evil thing. It was all about stealing money from the Jews." He said he would never take a role as a Nazi. "It's too terrible."
He was asked if it was true that James Cameron designed Terminator with him in mind. He said it was. For years he denied it, over and over, and then in an interview for the Blu-Ray DVD of Terminator he was asked the question. He denied it again, but someone else who was there said, "Yes, it was written for you. I remember that." So the story was out.
James Cameron had written the script, and gave him a copy, asking him to go with him to his meeting with the producer, where he was to pitch the story to get the money to make the movie. "We had no budget. I bought my costume off a waiter. I dressed up for the meeting, and kicked the door in. The secretary almost passed out. I went into the meeting and stood there giving the producer the hairy eyeball. The producer said Cameron could have the money for the movie. He said he could do anything he wanted - as long as you don't cast him."
Someone asked if he were still on good terms with James Cameron. "I'd be a fool not to be."
His first role as an FBI agent was in Dog Day Afternoon. "I wanted to play the transsexual. They wouldn't let me. So when I got my role in Network I wanted to play it gay. I was an agent. All the agents I know are gay. They weren't interested. So I wore panty hose under the suit."
He talked about how he much preferred the first season of Millennium to the second. "It was about a chess player, a guy who sees connections, it's fabulous - the idea of a guy that smart. I've met people like that. It's logic, it's not psychic. Then they made it just paranormal. That was disappointing. The reality is so much more interesting."
In Dead Man (1995), "all my lines were improvised. Johnny Depp didn't backtalk me at all."
He has a Facebook page, but he isn't into computers. "I'm from another generation, man. I write with a prune."
His hobby is pottery. "I'm a compulsive potter. When I'm not acting, I'm in the potting studio with my dog."
He talked about developing the role of the android Bishop in Aliens 3. "Androids aren't happening until androids become self-aware. I played myself with my emotional life when I was twelve, as if I was black in Apartheid South Africa. I was there, when I was a sailor. It was scary."
For his scene where he was sticking a knife in the table between his fingers, he had to practise with differnet kinds of knives. "When I got to London they opened my suitcase at customs and saw about ten knives." I said, 'I'm an actor, I'm not in the IRA.'
"They said, 'Did you say IRA?'
"Fox Studios had to come and get me."
