Exclusive: Ron Perlman Talks Poker Night
Staci Layne Wilson
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“Now that I think back on it, it’s all my fault,” says Ron Perlman, after frittering away the first few minutes of our timed Poker Night (review) interview on his memories of living in New York and getting lost in Brooklyn. “It’s all your fault,” I agree.
Ron Perlman: Everything that happens and goes askew in this interview is my fault.
Dread Central: Okay, you can take all the blame.
RP: Ah shoot, where were we?
DC: Poker Night…
RP: Anyway — I’m sorry, got to go.
DC: Well, if you don’t want to talk about Poker Night, I could bring up the Uwe Boll movie I interviewed you on set for. That was 10 years ago.
RP: Those where the days!
DC: Yes indeed, you’ve come a long way since then.
RP: That’s one of the bodies of proof that seals the deal on the fact that I will do anything.
DC: Too funny. You know – and I think this was even before selfies were popular — I have a picture of you and I, and you took the picture.
RP: I think that I should take credit for it, it should be called the Perly.
DC: Exactly.
RP: I think we were doing it with old 35 mm cameras in those days. It was pre-electricity, wasn’t it?
DC: I think so. Actually, you had a stone tablet and a chisel and you were creating our likeness that way. It was great.
RP: OK, so you have questions about Poker Night.
DC: I’m sure you’re offered a lot of roles, so what is it about Poker Night that made you decide to take that one in particular?
RP: It was the script first and foremost, and then I found out who else they were beginning to enlist. Most of those guys who sat around the table… I knew from before. I’d worked with Ron Eldard, Titus Welliver, all of them from the neighborhood in New York when we were coming up and struggling theatre actors, and I love the notion of a bunch of guys who all generationally had these common threads sitting around participating in this ensemble. I actually thought that Greg Francis, who wrote and directed the script, had a pretty good ear for a kind of hard-boiled semi-noir war dialogue, and it was so stylized that it was indicative of the fact that it was a good chance he was going to make an interesting film. And so I just… like I do a lot… I just rolled the dice, and I said, ‘Okay, you know, you want me that bad, you got me,’ and when I did this film, it didn’t take long… But why…? Did you hate it? Why are you asking me this?
DC: [laughs.] I noticed that Greg Francis did a lot of television before this, and many of his credits are true crime shows, like “FBI Files”, “Criminal Pursuits”, etc., and he has a background in these sorts of things so there is some reality to it, but like you said, it’s kind of noir-ish. So how would you describe the film to somebody who knows nothing about it?
RP: Well, I’m not good with labels in general because when you label something, you dismiss it as all of the other things that it might have overtones of, and this definitely has overtones of a number of different genres: psychological thriller, some horror… Time’s up!
Greg Francis writes and directs. Ron Perlman, Giancarlo Esposito, Beau Mirchoff, Titus Welliver, Michael Eklund, Ron Eldard, and Corey Large star.
Synopsis:
In this twisted thriller a young detective is caught in a sadistic game of cat-and-mouse when he is kidnapped and tormented by a masked serial killer. In order to survive, the rookie must use the wisdom imparted to him by senior detectives on their regular poker night.
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