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            Born to be bad, Brad Dourif sinks his teeth-and talent-into Middle-earth's nasty quisling.

By: Ian Spelling

Typed in by: Sigrdrífa Ullrsdóttir

STARLOG/April 2003 http://www.starlog.com

It has been that Shelley Duvall was born to play Olive Oyl in Popeye, and that it was in the cards that Jack Nicholson to potray the Joker in Batman and that Arnold Schwartzenegger was built to be Conan the Barbarian. To that list of instances in which fate acted as an all-knowing casting agent, add Brad Dourif as Gríma Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. He lurks and lers in the film as if J.R.R. tolkien created the role specifically for the veteran baddie and star of One Flew Over the Cuckoo´s Nest, Mississippi Burning, ALIEN: Ressurrection, Blue Velvet, Dune and, of course, the Child´s Play horror flicks.

On the other hand...

“I didn’t get the part,” says Dourif, who admits that his lesser films like Soulkeeper, Prophecy 3, and Critters 4, have “paid the bills” during the lean years. “The guy they cast was a writer from England. He decided not to do it, and then I got the part. I had auditioned for it. I was in contention for a while. But I didn’t get it. I went out and did my disappointed thin. And then I got the good phone call.”

And so Dourif flew out to New Zealand to portray Wormtongue in The Two Towers and Return of the King. Wormtongue turns on his king, Théoden (Bernard Hill), at the behest of Saruman (Christopher Lee), the dark wizard who answers only to the darkest power of them all, Sauron. Creepier still, Wormtongue lusts for Théoden´s brave niece, Éowyn (Miranda Otto).

“There’s a guy who, when he is young, probably felt ugly, got picked on and learned how to anticipate people’s behavior.” He says.

Dourif, attempting to explain Wormtongue’ motivations. “He’s bright, lucid. He grows up and has this talent for gauging behavor. That’s perfect for a king. What does a king need? Somebody who can really figure out what people are up to, what they’re going to do, how they’re going to react, what they might be thinking. So this is the guy. This is the man you want. So Wormtongue is now involved wityh this royal family. He fuctions on a daily basis, every single day, with this family, but he never belongs. He never gets what he really needs. So he feels ugly and rejected. And then comes along Saruman, who comes up to him and says, ‘There’s this, this and this, and the end of the man is going to happen very soon.’ Wormtongue says. ‘You’re right’ and makes the choice.”

Forked Tongues
On the set, Dourif found himself most when in the company of one or more of the four men-Hill, Lee Sir Ian McKellan and the films’ writer-producer-director, Peter Jackson. “I didn’t have that much with Ian,” Dourif notes. “I watched Ian work and I had this very fast [onscreen] exchange with him. Gandalf disposes of me quickly. Bernard and I, the first time we worked together, did a scene in which he’s about ready to kill me. We had fun. Of course, he wasn’t crawling on the groundd and screaming for his life, but it was still fun. A lot of the other stuff we did was really about invention and illusions, because there was magic involved in the scenes. We would say, ‘well, what if we try it this way?’ Those moments where I got to be the most inventive.



“The scenes with Christopher Lee were all exposition. Those scenes are always really hard to pull off. I enjoyed Christopher’s stories immensely, but I was struggling like all get-out to make that stuff work. I just felt awkward the whole time. It was exposition. I had to do it with an English accent. It was hard for me to figure out a way to make it real, to figure out what I was up to there. I just never really felt comfortable with those scenes. Thank God for ADR, because I think we fixed them all in post-production. But I really struggled.



“Chris, though, is larger-than-life.” Dourif smiles. “We’re talking Dracula here. I knew who he was. He’s Christopher Lee, man. He’s probably one of the most surprising people you could possibly meet and talk to. He’s extremely erudite and you think, ‘Is this guy for real or not?’ And the thing that’s weird about him is that he’s very much for real. He can literally take any pointed object and hit a bullseye with it; it doesn’t matter what the object is. He’s a master swordsman. He was in the Secret Service. God knows, he may have wom World War II! We’ll never know. So he’ll tell you a lot of stories, and they’re all true. And he’s really understanding what he’s capable of, and that’s what’s remarkable about him.



“And Peter is incredible, too. Heavenly Creatures is a great movie. He’s just an extradinary director. He’s really jolly soul with a nicely warped sense of humor and a vision. He has done horror films, too. I haven’t seen his early ones, but I’m going to. He has a vivid imagination. Every once in a while-those few times when I felt like I really pleased him-he would kind of go off chuckling to himself and rubbing his hands together saying ‘Renfield, evil, yes’. So he had a wonderful sense of humor about all this.”

Tongue Twisters
< Dourif plays Wormtongue straight. He’s a weasel, an oily figure on a mission. And it’s a mission he takes quite seriously. Dourif could have shot over the top with his portayal, but didn’t. “First of all, if I think about a ham sandwich, it looks really strong.” He laughs. “I just try to trust myself as far as not going over the top. I have a think inside that knows whatever I do is enough. The focus of me is always trying to get a person, a character, to be real. If people believe that Wormtongue is a real guy, then it’s scary. So I sat down with [screenwriters] Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens at the beginning of this shoot and we tried to figure out what this guy’s backstory was and we came up with one. They consequently did some rewriting. There’s a scene between Wormtongue and Éowyn that we did [where Wormtongue expresses his lustful feelings] that’s not in the book. That was an effort to make the guy much more of a human being.



“The thing about bad guys is that bad do things to people. If you’re a good guy then things are done to you. In a sense, that is the the central difference in the acting process. It’s kin of tough to have things happen to you when you’re acting. It requires much more trust and much more luck. You either feel it or you don’t. Out unconscious is much more of a mystery than we wish it was. You have to tease yourself to get into it. It has to happen indirectly. A bad guy goes in there and does whatever he has to do.”



And Dourif, of course, knows his bad guys. Not only is Chucky the killer doll (and Child’s Play human alter-ego Charles Lee Ray) on the actor’s résumé, but there’s convicted murderer Luther Lee Boggs (The X-Files’ “Beyond the Sea”), the Gemini Killer of the Exorcist III and the homicidal Starfleet ensign, Lon Suder. Seen in Star Trek: Voyager’s “Meld” and the “Basics” two-parter, Suder “started off a serial killer” before evolving into a hero who sacrifices his life to save his shipmates (topics the actor discussed in the OFFICIAL STAR TREK: VOYAGER Magazine #9).



“The Lord of the Rings is really a mythology.” Dourif observes. “It’s about a primordial time, a time before man, before reality. It’s like being a teenager when anything is possible. It’s a different life than the one that we lead when we’re adults and reality is hard and cold and we’re limited all of a sudden. And Wormtongue is a guy who’s turned by a force of evil, and it’s never simple. It’s grey. So he’s a human who has turned, and there needs to be a real feeling about that. That was what was most intriguing for me, the function Wormtongue really has. When Tolkien writes about Wormtongue, the character comes in, has a confrontation and, really, the character is over with. His power is taken away and he’s over with. Yet Tolkien says little things about him throughout the book, to the end of the story.



“Wormtongue is interesting because he’s a human being,” observes Dourif. “We need to feel that tragedy of somebody who has turned evil. What was once fierce becomes pathetic and just human, and we sadly identify with him in some way. That was the trick of it for me. That was the trick of the whole thing. That was intriguing.”



And it’s not like Dourif didn’t have previous experience playing a treacherous character in an epic big-screen adaptation of a cult novel. SF and fantasy fans will recall David Lynch’s Dune, in which Dourif provided much-needed menace as Piter De Vries. “They’re very different,” Dourif says of Dune and Rings. “One is science fiction and the other is Middle-Earth. Middle-Earth is familiar because it’s mythical. The specific future stuff doesn’t have that familiarity. The problem with going into the future is that you don’t have any kind of idea what the world will be. When you walk down the street in a future world, what should the street look like? If you look this way and that way, it can’t just be the end of the set. You have to have an



overwhelming amount of invention to make that future stuff work. And I thought I was very well-prepared when I went in for Dune. I reinvented Piter because, from the book, you don’t really have an idea-from an actor’s sense-who this guy is anyway, shape or form. Whereas with Wormtongue, I knew who he was from the book.”

Tongue-Lashings
Dourif’s performance in The Two Towers should capture the attention of producers, directors and casting agents, which will in turn hopefully lead to more jobs. The actor cracks an evil smile when asked what kind of roles he would like to see come his way. “You mean, am I now gonna start to play bad guys?” he asks, building to an anti-movie rant. “Any time you do a movie that has a little heat, you get a little heat. Heat is always welcome because maybe I’ll get more work. I want to do a TV series now, though. I can’t stand movies anymore. They’re boring to go see. Everything is the same to me. I’m bored. TV is better, much better. There are always exceptions. My Big Fat Greek Wedding is an exception. The Lord of the Rings is an exception.



“People are going to see films practically no matter what the studios do, but it’s pretty bad. It’s not a director’s medium anymore, really. It’s a corporate medium now. The independent market has been destroyed because the independent companies wanted to do big films, because it has gotten to a point where audiences won’t go [to a movie] unless they are seen on an ad on TV-because TV ad means real film. That isn’t the way it used to be. It used to be that when you wanted to see a movie, you looked at the newspaper, read the reviews and them picked a movie. You didn’t pick it from television. It was much cheaper to advertise in papers. Now, it doesn’t matter how cheaply you will make a movie because you need an $18-20-million budget just to put it in the theaters and advertise it. Who’s going to do that now?



“It’s about feeling safe. That’s all [studios] want to do, is feel safe.” Dourif points out. “When you go in to a movie, you go to see a story being told by one storyteller. He then has to enhance the storyteller’s ability to tell the story. It should never be a situation-like we have now-where a studio has a committee that goes over the story and makes artistic suggestions. What the hell is going on there? That’s destructive. Even though it might even be a good idea, it’s not the storyteller’s idea. It’s not his bent. You lose the sense of the individual’s storytelling, and that’s why I’m bored.”



And that’s why he appreciated the Lord of the Rings films. “Peter made these.” Brad Dourif emphasizes. “I was there when the sigh of relief came. There was a half-hour [Fellowship of the Ring preview] reel that was being prepared, and I was there when it came out. New Line saw it, and their ass was on the line, I will tell you. You could really sense that. They came down to see this half-hour and they loved it. They said, ‘OK, make your movie.’ And Peter made his movie.”