Ray Wise: Hi, Steve.

RW: I’m good. How are you?

RW: Oh right, I absolutely remember that party.

RW: Oh, good.

RW: We have good and bad aspects of our characters.

RW: Oh, gosh. It’s just something that I feel very comfortable playing, and it’s very innate and intuitive. It probably comes from my life experiences and what I’ve felt going into each job and character that I play, where I just have to walk in on the first day and be that person, that character. So I have to really feel that and have to believe in it, and I become an authoritarian over all of my characters. Right from the beginning, I have to be spot on, and be very focused.



And then of course, my experiences over the years. I grew up as a young boy in the '50s. I was a moviephile and watched everything I could possibly watch. All of those actors, all of those performances, they all made impressions on me, and I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many of them I borrowed little things from. So, yeah it’s an accumulation and a culmination of a lot of life experiences, a lot of work experiences, and that’s where I am.

RW: You saw it?!

RW: Oh, yes. I heard about that. Yeah, I’ve not seen it.

RW: It was great. It was wonderful. Adam is a really good filmmaker. It was a nice piece of writing and it was really guerilla filmmaking. We were on the move and used all hand-held cameras. It was a wonderful experience to create that world. The whole concept of this guy who believed there was an underground civilization was really appealing to me. Then we made up little secret things that only we knew about and that the audience wouldn’t, and you see subtle signs of it, but it’s never really spoken.

RW: Yeah, it was really different, and I really enjoyed it, I loved it.

RW: Exactly, yeah. Plus, the guy looks good in a suit. [laughs]

RW: It was great. We all got together, the entire cast, except for Missy Peregrym. But Tyler [Labine], Bret [Harrison], and Rick (Gonzalez], we all got together and had this great session that they filmed, and there was a Q&A thing, and we were there with our creators, Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas, and it was just a great experience. And I was so pleased that FearNet was rerunning "Reaper" on their network. I was a big fan of that show myself, and I thought it was just really well done and well written, and it should have gone on much longer because they had a wealth of material yet to explore.

RW: Was that at Fantasia?

RW: I was there a few years back with JEEPERS CREEPERS 2. Yeah, and a movie called DEAD END. I had two movies there one summer, so they had me come up there. That’s a fun festival, isn’t it?

RW: Yeah, Montreal’s a great city, a lot of good restaurants; it’s a fun place.

RW: I was up in San Francisco visiting my daughter and I was checking my email on her computer, and I got an email from [director] Mike Mendez saying, “I’m doing this movie, it’s all about a giant spider that eats Los Angeles, and I would love you to play this part of Major Braxton Tanner. This is the kind of guy he is, and he’s going to be chasing after this spider with his special forces, and he’s going to have run-ins with scientists and with an exterminator and his buddy.” Then he sent me the script when I got back to L.A. a couple of days later, and I read it and I thought it really had a lot of promise and that it was really well written and it could be I think something special. So I said, “Yeah, I’ll do it. I’ll play this guy.” Usually I would be playing the exterminator [laughs], but this time I was playing the straight military guy who’s the contrast to Greg Grunberg’s exterminator and, of course, Lombardo Boyar as his Sancho Panza. It was a good working relationship, and we had a lot of fun.

RW: I’ve seen kind of a rough cut of it. I have not seen the entire finished film with all of the the music and everything, but I saw a rough cut of it that I was very pleased, and surprised a lot of the effects turned out as well as it did.

RW: Me too. I felt the same way, yeah. When I read the script, I said, “Man, if he can pull this off on the kind of budget he’s talking about and the time restrictions and the shooting schedule, he’s really done Yeoman's work.” And Mike did it. He did it in every way, and I couldn’t have been more pleased.

RW: Yeah, I was playing the police captain.

RW: I saw RUBBER. Yeah, he’s another special guy. He’s got quite an imagination, and he’s going to go on and do some great stuff, I think. WRONG COPS was a lot of fun, I have to say. And then of course I went to a screening of it and got to sit next to Marilyn Manson, so that wasn’t too bad [laughs].

RW: About 85 or 90 of them I think altogether.

RW: Yeah, I had a lot of fun doing "Hart To Hart" with Robert Wagner and Stefanie Power. I always felt that he and I should do a brother series, where he was the older brother, and I could be his younger brother. We had this great epic fight in his house on "Hart To Hart." We smashed the grand piano and tore up his whole living room; it was a pretty epic episode, and I really enjoyed working with him. I think we always hoped that we would work together, but it never panned out. That’s one of the ones I really enjoyed.



Oh god, there are so many of them. I liked playing the character of Blair Sullivan on "Dallas." And I played Spiros Koralis on the "The Colbys," which was an off shoot of "Dynasty," and Ricardo Montalban was my stepfather, so most of my scenes were with Ricardo. And I had a few scenes with Charlton Heston because I was, if you'll forgive my language, screwing his daughter.

RW: And remember he very angrily wrapping on the door of my apartment, and I opened it with a towel around my waist, and there was Ben Hur staring at me.

RW: It was. And Ricardo was just a sweetheart, man. Ricardo Montalban was the best. Loved him. So yeah, those were high points.

RW: Oh yeah, I loved those. On "Next Generation," I played a Mintaken which is kind of a lower-case Vulcan. We sort of look like Vulcans, but our brains are about half the size, probably. We aren’t too smart. And I thought that Picard was a god, and I tried to prove it by shooting him with my bow and arrow. Of course, he bled like all humans do, and I discovered that he really wasn’t a god. Then I did "Star Trek: Voyager," where I played Arturis, who was from another alien civilization, and he has a head about three times the size of most people’s heads to accommodate like a couple of brains. It looks like this big huge giant shrimp on the top of my shoulders. And that was great fun, I enjoyed doing "Voyager" too.

RW: Off of those two alone, I know. They keep offering for me to do it, and maybe one day when I’m incapacitated and I can't act in front of a camera anymore I might go for that stuff [laughs].

RW: Influential.

RW: Yes, I do. I have the head piece tucked away in a box in a controlled-temperature room so it doesn’t deteriorate. I have the head from "Star Trek: Voyager" too, that big shrimp head that I talked about. And I have my costume from ROBOCOP that got blown up at the end, and it’s in tatters and it’s got a lot of burn spots on it. But it’s intact and I still have that, so I like to keep something from everything.

RW: Yeah, he had just done LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and THE HILLS HAVE EYES.

RW: I loved Wes. I really felt that he was going to do great things. He had an excellent way of working with actors, and, of course, I was working with Adrian Barbeau and Louis Jourdan and I was having a great time. We were in Charleston, South Carolina, which isn’t too shabby. We were staying at a great place and going to great restaurants in the evening, and then working out in the swamps during the day at the Magnolia Plantation, which had beautiful swamps with all the mangrove and all the different plants and animals. But all of our grips, they were carrying side arms because we ran into a lot of things like alligators and water moccasins. And then we had the black flies and huge mosquitoes to deal with.



But Wes was great, and I had always hoped that after that experience that I would work with him again someday, but it never happened again. We stayed in touch, and I went to a couple of his wedding parties. But I have the upmost respect for him, and, of course, he went on to do some pretty great things and has had an enormously successful career. But I will always be grateful to him for seeing me as Dr. Alec Holland.

RW: Yeah, I hate that. I hate that. [laughs] There’s no reason to remake ROBOCOP. Just play the 1987 version of it. Yeah, that’s silly. I don’t like that, and I don’t condone it, and I won’t support it. Every once in a while, a remake makes sense, but hardly ever. The remake of THE OMEN was silly, the remake of PSYCHO was silly--the whole shot-for-shot thing. If you’re going to make a remake of something, change it up a little bit so you’re not trying to do a Xerox copy of it and a poor Xerox at that, with the ink fading.

RW: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Some remakes make sense. You take something that’s really bad and improve on it. But no improvement was necessary on that one.

RW: I think both at this point. I think enough people know me and know my proclivities and what I like to do, and so when they think of something and they can’t get a big million-dollar actor then they’ll come to old Ray Wise [laughs]. But I have an affinity for it. I grew up in the '50s and I loved all of those horror movies, those creature pictures from THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, and THEM!, and THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD with Jimmy Arness. I grew up on those. They made a big impression on me. All the Hammer films made an impression on me, too, with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. A little off shoot of that, when I was doing "Love of Life," which is a soap opera in New York City for CBS, I started doing that in 1970, and for a brief time--a couple of years--I had a fan club for the character I played, and the gal who was the president of my fan club was also president of the American Peter Cushing fan club in New York. So I had that connection to Peter and Hammer films, we had the same president of the fan club for a brief time.

RW: Yeah, I think his was by far the scariest I think. I love the whole British stiff upper lip aspect of it, but also I’ve always wanted the definitive version of Dracula done. Coppola came fairly close to it, but I wanted to see the Bram Stoker book and that character done faithfully. He’s Romanian; he’s not British. In the development of the book, he starts out as a very old man and gets younger throughout the piece. They did that in Coppola’s version, which he calls BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA, but I would like to see a little bit more of a faithful version of that, and I’ve always wanted to play that character. I’ve always wanted to become Dracula.

RW: Yeah, I’m half Romanian. Back around 2001-02, I went to Romania to make a movie called WINDFALL with Robert England and Casper Van Dien, and Robert and I went to visit Dracula’s castle together. So, that’s a trip. If people knew that, they’d probably be a little shocked that Freddy Kruger and Leland Palmer were going to Dracula’s castle together.

RW: Yeah, I’ve done about five episodes already.

RW: Back in the old days when I first started doing it in 1970, all the actors on my soap were all New York stage actors, really great ones. The soaps today are pretty much--I don’t want to speak in a derogatory fashion about them--the characters on the show and the actors that get to play them don’t have that training that we used to have back in the '70s. They’re more hired, I think, for their looks. They’re the 8 x 10 glossies, and I’ve never been that. I’ve never been a great 8 x 10 glossy. So, I’m trying to bring my sensibilities to this character, and it’s a great character, and that’s why I agreed to do it. And it was around the Christmas and New Year's holiday, so it was great to stay in town just to do the show.



And I found that their pace is a good one. I like it, it’s kind of leisurely; it’s not like the old soap days where you approached everything as a play, and you started everything at the beginning and went on to the end and you never stopped. And we had prompters on the cameras then, if we went up on a line, we could see it on the prompter. We became very adept to doing that. But these cameras now, these days, they don’t have the prompters. They don’t need them. They shoot little pieces and they can do them again, as many times as they need to, and it’s just a great process, and I’m really enjoying it.



I think they originally talked of an arc of 5-15 episodes, so who knows where it’s going to go, but I’m enjoying it so far; it’s a great character. I play this guy named Ian Ward, who’s a cult leader. He has a following of people who believe in him and he’s kind of a life coach, I suppose, where he’s trying to show people the proper path to take to achieve their ultimate happiness. He’s that kind of a guy. He’s really a good conman is what he is, I suppose.

RW: I think it is something I’ve always had. I always wanna keep it going, you know, I try to go from one project to the next one to keep that momentum going, and that’s how I feel. You grow and develop the best as you can as an actor; you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to keep working. So, I’ve done big movies that pay a lot of money and I’ve done little movies that pay no money, and that’s never the deciding factor. The deciding factor for me always has been the story, the character, and how I react to both and, of course, other aspects of it like the director and other people in the cast. Really, how I respond to the character is the most important thing, and if I think that it’s something that I can do and do it well, and if it’s something that scares me a little bit--that sense of possible failure--I love to feel that because it motivates me, and then when something comes off and it comes off well, I really feel a sense of accomplishment. So, I guess that’s me in a nutshell.

RW: Yeah, that’s happened a lot of times. In fact, I really prefer that to happen, if I look at something and think, “How would one do that?” And then I know that I’m hooked. Then I apply everything to that problem, and then the character springs out of that.

RW: It was, yes, and in the span of just 16 episodes. Totally, totally. As I’ve always said--and I said it just a couple of days ago when I was with David [Lynch]--it was the best of times, to borrow a line from Charles Dickens.

RW: [laughs] Well, I’m sure more rumors will come out of it, but we were meeting to discuss and do some things for the new box set that’s coming out on Blu-ray. All the "Twin Peaks" episodes, including the pilot, also paired with FIRE WALK WITH ME, the prequel movie. So, all the "Twin Peaks" material is going to be in this new set, plus deleted scenes from FIRE WALK WITH ME.

RW: Yeah, it’s going to happen. I don’t know what happened to be able to do it, I suppose it has something to do with the French producers. But, it’s happening. I guess the first cut of David’s film, FIRE WALK WITH ME, was probably around three-and-a-half hours long, maybe approaching four, we’ll probably see a lot of that material on the new set.

RW: I don't think it’s quite there yet, but it’s happening. It’s going to happen sooner rather than later.

RW: No, never [laughs]!

RW: No, we all had our own opinions and thoughts about the direction things were going, but, no, none of us really had any idea what David and Mark [Frost] were concocting for us, and that’s the way they wanted it. They wanted us to be real people in this town. They don’t know what’s coming around the bend, what the next day is going to bring, and that’s the way we approached it as our characters. We got into the swing of things right away when we were making the pilot, and then we thought, “It’s over. That's that.” Then the series came along, and it just mushroomed into the cultural phenomenon that "Twin Peaks" became.



We knew right at the beginning, everybody in the cast, what we were doing and the tone, and we felt we could carry it on no matter who the director was, and we had a lot of different directors. A lot of great movie directors. Tim Hunter, James Foley, Caleb Dechanel, just a bunch of them. And even later, Diane Keaton came on and directed an episode and of course David did about five or six of them, and those were always very special, working with him again. It was quite an experience, and it was a great boost for me career wise, but more than that it was just a great freedom of expression that I, as Leland Palmer, was able to run the whole entire gamut during those 16 episodes. I got to do everything imaginable that you could do on television, certainly. We’ll never see the likes of it again, I don’t think.

RW: Well, sort of. I wouldn't say noticeably. I always got those type of roles. The thing that I noticed the most was producers and directors just wanting to meet me because they were fans of the show. Steven Spielberg wanted to meet me, and for a while I was up for JURASSIC PARK, but then Phillip Kaufman came along and offered me RISING SUN before Spielberg would commit to anything on JURASSIC PARK. Anyway, he wanted to meet Leland Palmer. He was a big fan of the show, and Diane Keaton, who was casting a movie, wanted to meet Leland Palmer, and so I went to a lot of these interviews and auditions just to meet directors and producers who wanted to meet my character from that show.

RW: The lawyer.

RW: I did a movie called LAND OF LEOPOLD. I did that in Austin, Texas. I did another movie in Baton Rouge recently called DEAD STILL, where I played this turn-of-the-century photographer of the dead. I actually grew a little goatee and a mustache for that one.

RW: Yeah, the facial hair was a groovy aspect of this whole thing, and I really liked it so there might be a few different Ray Wise’s coming down the pike here. And I have a whole bunch of other films. You know about DIGGING UP THE MARROW, and I have another one called SUBURBAN GOTHIC that I made with the director Ricky Bates, who did EXCISION that was Sundance a season or two ago. And I did another one with Olivia Wilde, this science fiction film that I can't remember the title of [he may be talking about LAZARUS, although he's not listed in the credits yet].

RW: Yeah, they’re all mushing together in my mind now, just one after the other, and that’s the way I like to keep it going.

RW: Yeah, my son calls me that. [laughs]

RW: Yeah, I’m feeling good--creatively and physically--so it’s a go from here on out.

RW: I hope so, man. It was really great talking to you. I enjoyed this interview immensely, thanks.