Ron Perlman on ‘Sons of Anarchy,’ Holy Rollers and Donald Trump
Before Hand of God, Ron Perlman had never spoken in tongues. Then, his character, Judge Pernell Harris, had an religious epiphany, so the 65-year-old actor had to learn quickly. “There’s no right way of doing it, there’s no wrong way of doing it,” says the actor, who looked up YouTube clips to see how those touched by the Spirit speak. “It’s one of these things that comes out differently depending on who it’s coming out of.” The trick, he says, was figuring out how a tough-as-nails character like Harris would react to the Lord flowing through him. “Some people do it very calmly and collectedly, and some people are just shaking and out of control,” he says, speaking typically slowly. “I tried to find something that honored both extremes.”
In this particular case, that meant standing in a public fountain naked, shivering and blathering. Hand of God — which premieres on Friday, September 4th — finds Perlman in familiar territory, playing a flawed and conflicted antihero beset by change around him, but he’s one of the few actors skilled enough to navigate it without a compass. What’s somewhat different for the actor, who is known best for unique outsider roles like Clay Morrow on Sons of Anarchy and the titular demon in Hellboy, is that his well-to-do pillar of society finds himself in the process of becoming an outsider.
The pilot for the Amazon show finds the Honorable Judge Harris grappling with a litany of conflicting feelings: His son is comatose following a suicide attempt; his daughter-in-law was recently sexually assaulted; he’s married but he’s trying to break off an affair with a call girl. Most troubling of all, Harris has begun seeing visions, leading him to carry out brutal, murderous acts of vengeance. And that’s after he just found God.
“I couldn’t believe my good fortune when I read the script, that I found a role with all of the characteristics about what’s interesting in mankind rolled up into one,” says the monolithic actor, leaning back on the couch of a Manhattan hotel room. “Loyalty, infidelity, fidelity, love, zealotry, insanity and inspiration — all these things are dealt with in this show. He possesses a compendium of characteristics that would be the envy for anybody who aspires to call themselves an actor.” Here, Perlman tells Rolling Stone how he embraced those heinous-to-holy qualities, as well as how his experiences on Sons of Anarchy and working with Guillermo del Toro helped him get his footing on Hand of God.
What’s the most challenging part of playing someone who’s drawn in so many different directions?
Harris is compromised emotionally, and he’s in emotional pain. He’s a guy who’s gone from being completely sure-footed in every situation to someone who, for the first time, is now possibly dealing with self-doubt.
And he deals with it partly through this new religion. How was your baptism scene? It looked cold.
It was cold, and that scene took half a day. They lured me in there by saying they heated the fountain. Of course it’s an acre and a half, so you’re not going to heat an acre-and-a-half fountain in San Pedro. But when they turned it on to do the scene and those gusts of water came, it was like “Gah!” I had a lot of trouble just speaking because I was being pelted and assaulted by very, very cold water.