 STARLOG 151 - FEBRUARY 1990
Starlog #151 February 1990... War of the Worlds Meet Morthren
menace
Tall, Dark & Alien ... Nevertheless, he's human-or so says
actor Denis Forest
As Malzor, I am the head of this crowd of oddly-dressed extras milling about
on the set, " quips Denis Forest in his soft accent. A French Canadian, his name
is pronounced "Denee Foray." He sits in his dressing room, waiting out the heavy
rain outside. A photograph of an infamous dictator hangs on the door as a joke.
Slender, pale, ascetic, Forest herdly looks the part of the "heavy," but he is
the new villain for The War of the Worlds' second season.
"Malzor is a
cross between Manuel Noriega and Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen
bomb," he continues. "He is a horrible autocrat who likes to sacrifice people to
his power. Molzor tries to gather as many souls as he can, like an Aztec or
Mayan warlord. He is ruthless. He thinks he knows how to stay in power, but he
is an autocrat who must rely on his deity, the Eternal. The Eternal deals in
very Eastern ideas, such as eternity and roads that you must travel without
knowing where you're going. It's a bit of alchemy, a bit of shamanism. The
Eternal knows all the answers. but Malzor is just guessing. I can't go too far
with the characterization, though. I can't invent too broad a mannerism, an eye
twitch or something, because I have to remain consistent with it all the way
through the season. What I'm discovering is that the producers want more and
more kind of simple delivery, just as I'm speaking to you now--not too
contemporized, just a stillness. Underplay everything. Just let the words say
it."
Portraying a convincing alien remains a problem for any actor.
Two-and-half months after first conversation, Forest feels that he is still
coming to grips with the character. "After doing six episodes with the character
being slightly unstable and not knowing where his base is, I have to find a more
concrete foundation for him, a greater stillness. He is weak in a sense, and he
is strong sometimes. In a way, he's the puppet that we poke fun at. I mean,
anybody in real life who provokes people to become more fascistic is clearly
deviant. He needs to project more authority, less nervousness. He relies too
much on other people to make his decisions for him. He is the one who has to
link with the Eternal; he should be the one to make the final
decisions."
Sitting in the cramped soundman's booth in a corner of the
huge, darkened set, it is difficult to hear the actor's quiet voice. "The heart
of the Morthren, I think, is that they're working towards eternal perfection.
It's a fascistic perfection-you have to look a certain way, think a certain way,
give everything to sustaining what the eternal needs. Malzor will kill of
destroy anyone or anything to further the Eternal. There is a spiritual strength
behind it, though, so I look at Malzor as a warrior priest. You have to respect
him, but he is very cruel."
An explosion shakes the Morthren lav set a
few yards away, as a scripted accident destroys a huge piece of complex alien
scientific equipment, incinerating a technician. "There's a certain amount of
obsessive energy that has to go into this character," Forest says thoughtfully,
his voice very low and calm. He smooths a wrinkle in his grey Morthren tunic. "I
mean, to be taking over the world, you would have to be somewhat obsessed. I
would like to see Malzor less human, with more twisted mysticism. And he can't
be at all sarcastic. Sarcasm is far too human, so a more still, direct, stoic
approach is needed which will distinguish us from the humans. It's hard
sometimes when you get lines like, 'Kill the soldiers, but don't harm the
leader.' It's not exactly like saying hi to the woman at the corner store. It's
hard not to go over the top in doing this kind of thing. If you do, then the
people won't believe you and they won't like you."
Hypnotic
Villain Denis Forest has more than a little experience as an actor portraying
fiends. He appeared in the series ' first season episode, "Vengeance" as the
maniacally driven husband of a woman Ironhorse accidentally killed, and as
"guest villain of the week" on three episodes, including the pilot, of Triumph
Entertainment's other Toronto-based production, Friday the 13th: The Series. A
graduate to Toronto's Ryerson Theatre School, his guest appearances as unsavory
characters on Knightwatch as well as other network shows and his portrayal of
Chicout in Atlantis Film's Destiny to Order, add to his credentials as screen
bad guy.
"Your eyes are literally hypnotizing your public," says Forest
of his technique. "The audience follows eyes, so if you can visualize and create
an internal world and project that through your eyes, it can be very powerful.
It's just a question of finding the evil aspects of my own nature to portray on
the screen. I love to create images in my mind that will spark the feeling of
the character, you know, where I want people to fear me. It's strange. The power
of seeing someone suffer is incredible. If you're pious, you suffer with them,
but if you're maniacal individual, you gloat.
"The Ayatollah Khomeini was
a lot of the fuel for my visualization-hordes of people, spiritually motivated
by him. He wasted thousands of lives. It's a Dantean nightmare-a demagogue who
feeds on the death of young people and on the death of his nation to fuel a
vision of his own. There are elements of Nosferatu in this, too. I would love to
play a vampire-not the kind that bites your neck, but the kind that sucks the
energy out of you. I try to find a parallelto the stoic mask the Ayatollah
maintained and to the frenzy he created: That's every autocrat's dream, to have
that kind of fervor from the people. Can you imagine? To have millions of People
marching for you, people dying? The energy of it-a huge ego trip! That's
obsession. That's what I would like for my character. As for my real life," he
adds with a Gallic twinkle, "I would like a fan club-a small one. I don't really
like writing letters."
It's a specific brand of villainy. "There's the
whole idea of human sacrifice underlying the character, "Forest says, "somewhat
reminiscent of what the ancient Mayans did in a way, sacrificing people for the
appeasement of cosmic energies. I'm looking for literature on human sacrifices.
I just picked up a book that deals with the recent rash of cocaine banderos
sacrificing individuals in weird rituals. Another source I draw from is Edward
Teller. Any mind that can conceive of such destructive power as the H-bomb is
definitely a threat to mankind. It's always important for an actor to find a
real basis for waht he's doing.
"I look towards those archetypes like
Adolph Hitler and the Ayatollah Khomeini who dwell on the idea of destroying
things, to mold the character and yet still rely very much on my own way of
perceiving things. It's hard to play a character on series TV: You assume a
mold, sometimes you bring it up a bit, but you end up playing yourself."
Forest subscribes to the actors' theory that villains have more fun.
"Actor villains, "he says with relish, "work like the witch doctor in a tribal
community. There you have the guy who puts on a mask and evokes evil feelings
and fear in people. These evil feelings are in all of us. When you see the mask,
you're repulsed and repudiate the feelings and get rid of them. That's the
treatment I would like to give to Malzor. The mask that I can turn on is a
despondent death mask. I equate to indifference which is the greatest sin.
Malzor is indifferent to human suffering.
"For me to say that I get this
rush from hypnotizing maybe 50,000 people sounds like complete madness, "admits
Forest with a shrug, "but the public is hypnotized by what they see on TV. I
travel a lot. I was in Amsterdam and this girl from Philadelphia zoned into me
and said, 'You played Eddie in the episode of Friday the 13th. You killed that
girl with the bees. What are you doing here?"
"When you get into these
ideas, you do actually became more intimidating to people. you tend
unconsciously to stare people down. I have these strange eyes. A little while
ago, I went the movies and I asked someone a simple question like, 'Have you
bought your ticket?' He looked me in the eyes and didn't know quite what to do.
Was I a cup? Was I theater police? He didn't want to answer; he just looked
down.
"Sometimes, I like to read my lines out loud," the actor notes.
"You have these words to remember, so you practice them, like a violinist
practices his instrument. At the YMCA, I'll be working out and running these
lines. People think I'm nuts."
Imaginary Alien Of the details of
Morthren life, Denis Forest has little to reveal. How does Malzor relax, for
example? Does he read about techniques of dismemberment? "That would be fun,"
allows Forest. "He likes to see innocent people tortured. For entertainment, the
Morthren probably do complex mathematics that humans couldn't understand. It's
hard to know because our energy was sucked into human form when we came from our
home planet to Earth. I can't prove it but I think of them as having originally
been astral energy or beings of fire. It's as if I, or Malzor rather, was born
like this, "The actor spreads his arms and indicates his tall, slender human
form.
"It's sad to see people attacking movie stars. We haven't figured
out if Morthren sleep or what they do at all, probably a lot of plotting and
scheming. Malzor hasn't sat down once in six episodes. he hasn't eaten, though
we know that they're vegetarians. We need to see these aliens express deeper
feelings than they have so far. I would like the Morthren to observe humanity
more and try to understand what human suffering is-and human joy. It would be
interesting, and perhaps insightful, to see how they would analyze
that."
The actor adds that the show's creators have not been, in his
view, especially receptive to his input, at least so far. "There's too much of a
panic to get on camera what they have in the script," he explains.
An
assistant director wanders by and comments that the night's shooting is
progressing very slowly. A technician agrees. The camera is being aligned for a
difficult shot of an agonized, dying clone. Eerie yellow and green lights shine
balefully through the huge screens of intricately shredded latex that hang
everywhere throughout the darkened water-covered floor. Giant, fleshy alien
machines loom up in the dimness, hang from the ceiling, twine and twist
everywhere-the Morthren science laboratory. The mood on the set, though, is
light-hearted. A grip passes, gestures at the spectacle and says, "It's like
walking around inside King Kong's nose." Forest grins.
"It's a wonderful
crew," he says. "It's is always a treat to entertain them a bit with some humor.
Now and then, we have to jump over some green glop, and maybe slip on a patch,
but there have been no practical jokes so far, thank God. I don't think we have
the time. I ad-lib funny lines during rehearsals, but once we start shooting,
we're quite serious."
Despite all the changes in the show, newcomer
Forest reports that have been no difficulties relating with the survivors of
last season's cast, Jared Martin and Lynda Mason Green. "We haven't played a
scene with them yet, "he discloses. "We do talk about them, though. Sometimes,
we bump into them when we're switching sets. They have bigger Winnebagos than we
do."
As for the show's changes themselves, Forest has little to say. "I
didn't watch the first season much," he demurs, "but the aliens last year were
big Muppets. With those costumes, they weren't convincing in my book. The fact
that we all have a tall, gaunt look this year indicates to the viewer that these
are aliens. Ironically, I used to have a girl friend who, because I have an odd,
knobbly-shaped forehead and face, used to call me 'alien head.' Now, I make my
living at it.
"Malzor is the leader that nobody has," Denis Forest
confides. "We have nobody, for example, who can tell us not to do drugs and be
listened to. Even our athletes now are full of drugs and steroids. We have no
real political or spiritual messiah who can lead us towards a greater
understanding of eternal things. It's a sick feeling because I don't like to
incarnate these kind of characters, so I have to play Malzor as working towards
perfecting a nobler race. The thing that I fear the most is that people will
judge me for what I do, which is just a fantasy. It is sad to see people
attacking movie stars. But Malzor could conceivably provoke some people to
fascistic violence. What I hope is that he will make your skin crawl, but won't
make you go kill your sister. I don't want to make babies cry when they see me
on the street."
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OVERSEAS MAGAZINE (USA, CANADA,)
STARLOG 151
FEBRUARY 1990
WAR OF THE WORLDS
... INTERVIEW WITH DENIS FOREST
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