Ron Perlman names his favourite actor of all time: “That’s an otherworldly gift…”
Born in Manhattan in 1950, Ron Perlman was convinced to pursue acting by his father, who saw him in a college production of Guys & Dolls and immediately recognised his gift. After appearing in The Name of The Rose opposite Sean Connery and landing his breakthrough role in the TV series Beauty and the Beast, Perlman won unique role after unique role, appearing in everything from Marc Caro’s The City of Lost Children to Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy. Here, Perlman discusses his favourite actor of all time.
From the beginning, Perlman was evoking the spirit of Marlon Brando, who famously starred as Sky Masterson in the film adaptation of Guys & Dolls. It must have been a strange moment in the Perlman household, then, when Ron landed a role opposite Brando in 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau.
During an interview with Rotten Tomatoes back in 2009, Perlman was asked to name some of his favourite films of all time: “The two films that have to be tied for first — and this is probably a hackneyed answer, but it is the way it is — are The Godfather, Part 1 and Citizen Kane,” he began. “The Godfather is a perfect film. There is not one shot out of place, there’s not one performance that’s not the best thing that actor has ever done. There is not one thing about the film, visually, that’s not mind-bogglingly beautiful and elegant and astounding. And it shines a light perfectly on its subject matter.”
Perlman went on to discuss the brilliance of Brando’s performance: “I think that there’s a gravitas, because of the presence of Marlon Brando, in the first film, that elevates it [as opposed to The Godfather, Part 2]. Not to say that the second and third films aren’t great films also, but when you have something as historically important as the performance that Brando gives as Vito Corleone, as the kind of central fulcrum point, then it goes into a class all by itself.”
“He achieved that three times in his career, as far as I’m concerned,” Perlman added. “One was On the Waterfront. One was A Streetcar Named Desire. And one was The Godfather. And although he was the prevailing genius of the day, on those three occasions he just elevated phenomenally brilliant films into a place that became uncategorisable. How did he do that? It’s so ethereal, and so indescribable, that you could try to analyse it from now until the end of time and you couldn’t begin to put your finger on it. That was an otherworldly gift, that he had.”
