EXCLUSIVE: Ron Perlman is still man of action. The indefatigable Hellboy and Sons Of Anarchy star, now 76, has half a dozen films in production, and next year is aiming to play Hemingway in a new biopic set in Cuba and will co-star in the anticipated Sons Of Anarchy spinoff Legends.
A year on from Deadline announcing the launch of Perlman’s Asylum Studios banner, we caught up with the veteran actor (who made his screen debut almost 50 years ago) and the company’s co-founder Willie Morris about their indie slate and Perlman’s anticipated studio projects.
DEADLINE: Ron, we almost met at the Venice Film Festival last month. I gather you were at the festival with a new project of yours called Sedona, but it wasn’t in the official lineup…
RON PERLMAN: Yeah, that’s right. Willie can touch on that project specifically…
WILLIE MORRIS: We just kicked off a partnership with Google and 100 Zeros [Google’s JV with Range]. We recently launched a teaser for Sedona on our new YouTube channel and we used some of their tech to give it depth, so that you could view it with VR glasses or spatial glasses if you wanted to as an additive feature.
PERLMAN: Last year I got to know Google VP Jon Zepp [VP Partnerships, formerly Managing Director of Entertainment Content] after I did the Doug Liman immersive film Asteroid. So he invited us along to the festival where they were doing some work in the immersive section. To me, Venice symbolizes a connection that’s temporarily lost, because it symbolizes the glamor and scope and pageantry of the way we used to enjoy our cinema.
DEADLINE: It’s a great festival for sure…So Google put money into Sedona?
MORRIS: Google put some money into our indie project, which is in post, and then in return we used their technology to create spatial videos that’ll appear on some of their launch campaigns with the glasses. So they they wanted some spatial content and to support the arts, and we needed some funds to help get this little indie movie up and going.
PERLMAN: Sedona won’t be ready for close to a year. But Google has been helpful in the launch of our YouTube channel. I’ve been evolving with regards to the intersection of tech and Asylum Studios. Tech isn’t something you can run away from, but it is something you can use as an enhancement to exploring the human experience.
DEADLINE: A.I. has been one of the hot-button topics of late. You recently acted in a short called The Ride that used A.I. I take it you’re not against working on projects that use A.I.?
PERLMAN: My barometer will always be whether the AI. is the tail that’s wagging the dog. If it is, I’m not interested. I’m not interested in any technology that replaces the unique contribution of the human heart and the human soul, but I am fully bracing myself for a way to use these new technologies to our advantage. Asylum is a celebration of conventional filmmaking, and and an extension of the shoulders upon which we stand. But everything that we’ve done here at Asylum just came out of the blue. It was like a punch in the nose. It was like that with our first movie, Kodak Super XX and with Sedona, which are both in post-production.
We wanted to create an environment where artists, particularly filmmakers, could flourish and have an opportunity to spread their wings with very original contributions to what has always been an edgy, dangerous and original art form, which has lost its way because streaming has diminished the pageantry and the scope of the space that cinema once occupied. Ours is basically a mandate to go back and and create an environment where that can happen as a norm rather than as as an aberration. At Asylum, we will try to be as much of an old legacy studio where we not only produce, but we also want to market and distribute our own films. Theatrical is the engine upon which everything else is based and it’s an incredibly potent revenue stream.
We don’t have the infrastructure or the war chest yet to to do all of the things I’m describing, but the dream is to become a full strength studio where we we make the movie and we put the movie out and we control all facets of its life all the way down to its last stop, which happens to be home entertainment.
DEADLINE: Do you have backers or is the company funded by yourself?
PERLMAN: We are in the process of building the war chest, but we’re a way off accomplishing that. It takes time. We have two movies in post and two or three others in development, and a TV series and a documentary.
Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images/Troy Harvey/Braden Moran
DEADLINE: We’ve previously covered Kodak Super XX with David Dastmalchian and Kelly Marie Tran. Tell us about Sedona. There’s not so much online about that one. Lili Simmons stars, right?
MORRIS: Lili Simmons, Israel Broussard, Nicholas Cirillo from Outer Banks, and Toby Sandman from Running Point. I joke that it’s The White Lotus on acid, but it’s about an actress who meets a very average guy, convinces him to come to Sedona for the weekend, and then her and her friends pretty much gaslight him for the entire weekend. It’s a bit of a fever dream psychological horror, and it’s very fun. Meanwhile, Kodal Super XX — which is likely to be called Super XX ultimately — is being submitted to festivals at the moment.
DEADLINE: What’s going into production next?
PERLMAN: I was recently filming in Ireland on Amazon MGM and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster’s horror movie Seasons. But for Asylum, it’s a foot race between two projects that we came to the party with. One is a Hemingway project, which has a look at Hemingway in his last couple of years, everything leading up to his suicide. It’s when he’s beginning to lose everything. That’s a project that’s very close to starting production. And then there’s a comedy called Auxiliary Man, which is a Tarantino-esque comedy, essentially because it’s a lot of white guys speaking ebonics, thinking they’re gangsters when they’re nothing but losers and bodies are dropping left and right, but you’re always realizing that you’re watching a comedy. It’s a crazy ass script, and that’s close to getting into production as well.
DEADLINE: It’s the centenary year of The Sun Also Rises’ publication, so there have been various Hemingway events globally. And I have covered other projects about Hemingway towards the end of his life. Would you play Hemingway and what sets this one apart?
PERLMAN: Asylum will produce. I’m playing Hemingway. I’m also co-directing the film with the celebrated Mexican DoP Gabriel Beristain, who is the guy who originally brought me to Cuba, and this is where I became infected with with this story and unable to get it out of my my psyche. After a decade, we’re finally going to make it very soon.
DEADLINE: I’ve always been a big fan of his work and like many, have been fascinated by his life. Even if he’s been more out of fashion in recent years for some of the ways he lived and thought …
PERLMAN: I don’t know a writer that doesn’t blurt that out. But we’re leaning into all of that. Look, he had a profound influence on the last century as an artist. And yet all of that was eclipsed by the man and how colorful and interesting he was. He caused a lot of debate and discussion, and he was polarizing. That’s what began to fascinate me. That and the fact that during his last years he he was at the vortex of the fall of Batista, the rise of Castro, and the wrath of J. Edgar Hoover.
DEADLINE: And he used to write standing up at an easel, right?
PERLMAN: He did, because he had back problems…
DEADLINE: Is this an original screenplay or based on a book?
PERLMAN: It was a story told to me by Cuban writer Enrique Cirules, who passed away a decade ago. He was obsessed with Hemingway and was his major biographer in Cuba, and had great access to parts of Hemingway’s life and psyche. The logline for the movie is ‘of all Hemingway’s mistresses, Cuba is the one that killed him’. So, when Enrique he told me the story about this perfect storm of Hemingway circling the drain, and then adding all of these political elements, all these psychological elements, all this paranoia where he thought J. Edgar Hoover was following him, which everybody thought was crazy at the time, but turned out to be true. It just was a story that I couldn’t get out of my mind.
DEADLINE: Is the Hemingway estate involved?
PERLMAN: The Hemingway estate is completely behind us. In fact, they’ve offered us his former home, the Finca Vigía, which is now a musem, for us to shoot in. We have the complete cooperation of many cultural players in Cuba. We have access to the La Bodeguita del Medio bar where he drank mojitos. We have access to the El Floridita bar, which he drank daiquiris in. We have access to the hotel Ambos Mundos where he wrote standing up, and he had two other rooms in the hotel that he had dalliances in. We have access to his famous boat Pilar. We have access to all of that.
DEADLINE: So what needs to happen next on the project?
PERLMAN: The dream was always to shoot it in Cuba. We’re figuring out if that’s possible. We have a backup plan to shoot in Spain if need be, but we’re hoping to make use of all these great places in Cuba.
DEADLINE: How does this fit with your schedule on Legends, the upcoming Sons of Anarchy spinoff?
PERLMAN: I’m trying to get Hemingway finished before we start filming Legends, which is slated to be sometime in March. I always wanted to film the Hemingway movie in January or February because it’s a little bit cooler in Havana, and after that it gets brutally hot and hard to wear prosthetics, which I obviously will do.
DEADLINE: How excited are you about Legends?
PERLMAN: I was blown away by what Charlie [Hunnam] was able to do there. I know how long he’s been floating this, and I know how hard it was to to get this boulder up the mountain, and the fact that he succeeded, and then the reaction on the internet was pretty singular. I don’t remember seeing anything that had more enthusiasm in terms of the way the world reacted to the news. We can’t wait to get back to work with with FX. John Landgraf, for me, was the greatest executive I’ve ever worked for because he has the the genius of an administrator, but the soul of an artist. The stories he has greenlit and made happen on his network I’ve never seen from an executive before.
DEADLINE: And you’ll be playing versions of yourself, right?
PERLMAN: Yeah. Believe me, having to audition for that was was humbling [laughs].
DEADLINE: Do you think Taylor Sheridan will be back for it? Your characters famously clashed in the first two seasons…
PERLMAN: Not over my dead body, motherfucker [laughs].
DEADLINE: You’ve read scripts?
PERLMAN: The only thing that’s been written so far is the pilot. Charlie is just assembling the writing room right now. When I get back, I’ll sit in and listen to things that are being bandied back and forth. But I’ve read a version of the pilot. I’m pretty sure it’ll evolve before we shoot in March in New Mexico.
DEADLINE: So it’s the same world and tone of Sons Of Anarchy or is it a departure?
PERLMAN: It’s both. It’s incredibly divergent initially, but it morphs into something that has the kind of outlaw danger aspect that Sons had.
DEADLINE: Sounds fun…And as for Asylum, will you be looking for investors in the company as you look to ramp up?
MORRIS: We haven’t officially gone our for a raise, but I think over the next couple months Ron and I will probably go down that path. We’ve been trying to figure out a way to bring industry figures in so that it’s not just traditional VCs and investors, but it’s more open to the people that we love.
DEADLINE: Finally, there’s always interest in your potential return to the Hellboy universe. Is that in any way possible? There have been non-studio/Guillermo Del Toro Hellboy movies since your last outing in the franchise 20 years ago…
PERLMAN: I’ve said so much about this and pissed off enough people, but I’ll say it again for you: the original movies were meant to be a trilogy. In Hellboy II, we left off at a very awkward moment where the Liz Sherman character is pregnant with twins, and none of the promises of Hellboy being summoned into existence to destroy the world has been addressed. That would all have been in the third film, and I’ll always advocate for the making of the third film. I’m not interested in doing any other version of Hellboy other than finishing the trilogy with Guillermo [Del Toro]. It would be so epic. Like a Greek epic. Hubris, hamartia, destiny, nature vs nurture, it would be such an adventure. I’m 76 now, and if he comes to me and I’m 86, we’ll still do the motherfucker.
DEADLINE: Do you still speak to Guillermo about doing it?
PERLMAN: No comment.
DEADLINE: Well, lot of fun things going on at Asylum and beyond.
PERLMAN: To borrow [and adapt] a phrase from Al Jolson, ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’. We’re building a great thing at Asylum.
