Will Hellboy be back?

Ron Perlman talks new series Hand of God and a possible Hellboy sequel.

By Reuters

Published: Tue 23 Jun 2015, 9:19 PM

Last updated: Wed 8 Jul 2015, 2:53 PM

Variety sat with Ron Perlman at the Monte Carlo TV festival, where he served as president of the 55th edition and prexy of the miniseries jury. The veteran actor candidly talked about his upcoming Amazon show, Hand of God, a thriller drama helmed by World War Z’s Marc Forster, and the buzz surrounding a new Hellboy movie.

How did you get involved in Hand of God?
Hand of God was an amazing coming together of me looking for something, not knowing what I was looking for and it coming and finding me. So I knew that when Sons of Anarchy was coming to a close for me, I wanted to stay in television because right now it’s such an exciting moment in television.

Why do you think TV drama is such a fertile ground for innovation today?
There is so much competition out there. Right now the only way to grab the attention of the audience is originality. We feed ourselves with franchises that’s the opposite of what makes our culture multidimensional and interesting. All you have to do is look at the people who are coming to television today. Twenty years ago you would never have seen Ridley Scott, Ang Lee or Guillermo del Toro — all these great filmmakers — actively put themselves back into TV.

Tell us about the character you play in Hand of God.
He’s a judge and he does the things that powerful and privileged people do, like bending the rules and regulations that apply to others. The only thing he’s ever known is winning, and when we meet him, he’s in the process of losing the one thing he couldn’t ever imagine losing: his son, his only child. His son is now on life support because he shot himself in the head. As a result of this, our main hero, the judge, is in the middle of a complete breakdown and disappears for three days, and when he comes back he’s baptized, saved and he’s donated $50,000 to this new startup church. We don’t know if this guy is for real. And suddenly he begins to hear voices through his son who is in a coma and cannot speak.

Now regarding Hellboy. There’s been a lot of headlines in the last couple days about you saying you would love to have a sequel to complete the trilogy...
Well yeah I mean, it started off with my little tweet... as a little goof like all of my tweets and within 48 hours I had 20,000 new followers on Twitter and 60,000 new friends on Facebook and I found out I hit a nerve that I didn’t even know was a nerve.

How have you reacted?
The discussion has now overtaken me rather than me overtaking the discussion. And here I am in Monte Carlo, working on my suntan, and people are still asking me about Hellboy 3, so I guess it’s still news. But I’ll tell you the same thing I’ve been telling everyone else, the Hellboy saga was meant to have a beginning, a middle and an end, and that, if you were loyal enough to us where you came and watched both those two movies that we made, we owe you a resolve. And there will come a time where he will have to live up to his destiny, which is to be the beast of the apocalypse, or if he has to suppress that destiny by sacrificing himself in some way so as to not destroy mankind but do the opposite. And that’s the discussion of the third film; I think it’s a discussion worth having, and I think it’s something we owe the fans and I’m being very clear about that with...

Did you hear from Guillermo del Toro?
I hear from him intermittently. Yeah.

Did he say something though about Hellboy 3?
Uh, no comment. I haven’t heard from him since I started this latest round of insanity.

But is the Hellboy sequel written?
It’s in Guillermo’s head. And he’s shared enough of it with me to know that it will be mind-blowing. It will be great cinema. And if you are somebody who followed the first two movies, it will be even more mind-blowing because we have something... if you liked the first one and the second one, we have something really rock ‘em, shock ‘em in the third one.