“Don’t even talk about that one”: The 1972 movie Lance Henriksen wants to delete from history
There can’t be many actors in Hollywood who have taken on not just a Xenomorph, but the Predator and the Terminator too and lived to tell the tale, but Lance Henriksen is one of them, although he is now 86 and so he probably wouldn’t last more than a few seconds these days, let’s face it.
The reason Henriksen has that claim to fame is that, alongside Bill Paxton and Michael Biehn, he was something of a favourite of James Cameron back in the day, lining up not just in The Terminator in 1984, which is an outrageously good film, but also 1986’s Aliens as the creepy android Bishop and 2004’s mash-up Alien vs Predator too. While Cameron didn’t direct that last one, he did put Henriksen in his very first directorial effort.
That was the brilliantly titled Piranha Part Two: The Spawning from 1982, in which Henriksen played a Police Chief trying to deal with, yep, you guessed it, a school of mutant piranha fish who have taken over a sunken freighter in the Caribbean. While it was Cameron’s first rodeo, it certainly wasn’t Henriksen’s – he’d been going since his first role as an uncredited marine in 1961’s The Outsider, starring Tony Curtis.
It marked the beginning of a career that would go on to span a staggering 250 movies, many of which were sci-fi or horror, but also included genuine classics like the Sidney Lumet and Al Pacino effort from 1975, Dog Day Afternoon.
Of course, any actor who has made that many films over more than 60 years is going to have a few misses in their locker, and Henriksen himself admits to being in some ‘turkeys’. Those include his first proper film from 1972 called It Ain’t Easy, a film in which he starred as a former soldier with PTSD.
Recalling being cast in the movie, Henriksen told AV Club, “Oh, don’t even talk about that one. I was at the Guthrie Theatre (in Minnesota) doing plays, and the guy wanted me to do that movie, and I remember that I just didn’t know anything about making films. Nothing! But I looked a certain way and that kind of shit, and I guess he thought, ‘This is gonna work out!’”
Thought to be the first feature film ever made in Minnesota, It Ain’t Easy also went by the names of Into the Storm and The Winnipeg Run, and basically involved Henriksen riding around on a snowmobile trying to escape his inner demons.
He added, “I remember one distinct scene where my girlfriend gets killed, and the director walked in and started crying and said, ‘Why do I write these kinds of things?’ And I went, ‘Jesus, you should be playing this role, man!’ I never mention that movie. I sucked in it. Totally.”
Luckily, Henriksen recovered pretty quickly and began starring in movies that have gone down as some of the more seminal sci-fi efforts, including Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, plus several of Lumet’s other films, like Network and Prince of the City. He also played a supporting role in one of the greatest space-related (but not alien-related) films in history, the epic Philip Kaufman-directed The Right Stuff, which told the story of the first American astronauts who began the space race with Russia.
