[WARNING – SONS OF ANARCHY SPOILERS FOLLOW!!!!]
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At the end of Sons of Anarchy season 5, Clay Morrow is in pretty bad shape. He’s been kicked out of SAMCRO, arrested for murder, and has a $10 million bounty on his head. Fortunately, Clay’s dire situation hasn’t worn down the man who plays him, Ron Perlman.
In a recent appearance at the C2E2 convention in Chicago, the 63-year-old actor – whose wide-ranging credits have made him a fan-favorite for decades – cheerfully answered questions about Sons of Anarchy, as well as a range of other topics including his longstanding friendship with Guillermo del Toro, his role in del Toro’s Pacific Rim, and why he keeps “punching away” at the director to make Hellboy 3.
On the subject of Sons of Anarchy, Perlman admitted that he knew how Clay’s story was going to unfold, but didn’t reveal it to the audience. Instead, he teased at some of the many possibilities for the character.
“There’s a million ways he could either extricate himself from that situation, or not extricate himself from that situation. Does he go inward? Does he go outward? Does he become more manipulative than ever? Is he more dangerous than ever, because he’s a cornered big cat? I don’t know. I mean, I do, but I’m not going to tell you.”
When asked about his role in Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, however, the actor was more forthcoming, describing his character Hannibal Chow in humorous detail.
“Hannibal Chow is kind of what you would imagine when you hear that a big, oversized Jew from New York is playing a guy named Hannibal Chow. He’s got to be the most full of sh-t guy on the face of the earth, and indeed that’s what he is. He’s a black marketeer. He has fashioned an agreement with the government whereby whenever these Kaiju fall in battle, he has the rights to farm them and market them. And he has fashioned a gazillion ways to profit off of these Kaiju.
So Hannibal Chow is a war profiteer, who has zero north moral compass whatsoever. He has no political loyalty whatsoever. He’s just a guy who profits off of other people’s misfortune.”
Perlman also took time to talk about the incredible scale of Pacific Rim and how del Toro’s commitment to building realistic sets has paid off again.
“That’s a signature of Guillermo. Whenever possible, he creates the real thing in three dimensions and he only uses CG as a sort of punctuation mark or enhancement to what you see with your own eye… He recreated about six blocks of Hong Kong – because Hannibal Chow’s lair is in Hong Kong – so the sequence that I was in was mind-blowing.”
Since he was at a comic book convention, Perlman was inevitably asked some questions about the possibility of Hellboy 3. Though Hellboy creator Mike Mignola recently stated that a third film isn’t currently in the works, and that he was once told by Universal that the movie would never get made, Perlman was still hopeful that he would have a chance to bring the trilogy to a conclusion.
Joking that he’s been giving del Toro “Jewish guilt,” Perlman told the crowd that he’s pushing to make the third movie.
“We both walked away from Hellboy 2 agreeing that there would never be another one. But, with the passage of time, it became clear to me that he really always designed it as a trilogy. He has a very well-articulated idea of what the resolve would look like and it’s amazingly theatrical and is epic in scope and would make for amazing cinema, with or without the first two movies.
But there are so many questions posed in the first two films that absolutely need to be answered. I said, ‘You owe it to the world to finish this trilogy.'”
Assuming he can convince Universal to give him the greenlight, given del Toro’s insanely busy schedule, it might be difficult for the director to find the time to return to the franchise. That being said, I think most fans would agree that an epic conclusion to the series would be more than welcome.
Fans of SoA, what do you think will happen to Clay in Season 6. And Hellboy fans, are you as eager as Ron Perlman to see a third film? Let us know in the comments.
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Pacific Rim will be in theaters on July 12, 2013.
