Sunday July 27, 2008
Nice and wise
By NOORSILA ABD MAJID
A source of considerable mirth, Ray Wise is no devil in disguise.
GIVE the devil to Ray Wise and the Reaper star will turn him into a super funny character. Oh, with no horns too.
“I would never show my horns,” jokes the amiable actor. “I have a feeling that if you ever do really see what I look like, you’re not going to like it very much.”
Au contraire, you are going to like Wise very much – no matter what. Punctuating every answer with deadpan humour and infectious laughter (“The way I’m looking right now, the devil is pretty much a nice person”), the gregarious 61-year-old is lovable. There are moments when he will try to “intimidate” you by throwing a devilish grin a la his alter ego in the new TV series Reaper. But instead of scaring the wits out of you, this man brings out the wits in you!
“The devil that I play is a combination of a very good car salesman, talk show host and game show host,” Wise describes his role, in a recent interview in Los Angeles. “But he has more elegance, is better dressed and a little more concerned with his personal hygiene. You’ll never see the spiky hairdo on me!”
No grim Reaper ... the devil (Ray Wise) and his bounty hunter, Sam (Bret Harrison). A dark comedy, Reaper revolves around a cute slacker named Sam (Bret Harrison) whose life changes dramatically after he learns on his 21st birthday that his parents have sold his soul to the devil (Wise), and that he must now serve as the devil’s bounty hunter.
Like all his co-stars in Reaper, Wise had to audition for his role. “They went through like over a hundred actors. Some of them are quite well-known and have played the devil before,” Wise reveals. “I came in sort of at the end of the process. But I beat out the previous devils. Huh. That’s not bad.”
Not bad for a seasoned actor, who, after close to three decades in the business, still has the drive to compete for his piecework. “As a professional actor, you get rejected about every other week,” he says. “You’re out of work and searching for a new job all over again. And you can be rejected two or three times in one day.
“They’re not just telling you that you’re not right for the job, but they’re really telling you that you’re not right for the job! They will tell you that your face, your body and everything about you, including the way you talk, is not right for the job. And that bugs me, you know. ... It used to bother me for days when I couldn’t get a job that I really wanted. Now it bothers me about four, five minutes.”
By all accounts, the (surprise!) director of Reaper, indie filmmaker Kevin Smith (Dogma) has a lot of respect for Wise. In fact, he is personally a fan, having watched the actor in his biggest TV hit back in the early 1990s, Twin Peaks. Coincidentally, Wise played a demonically possessed man, Leland Palmer, in the crime thriller.
“Well, I learned that Kevin was a big fan of Twin Peaks and I hadn’t known it! He said he wouldn’t have minded working with me 10 or 12 years ago. But I said, ‘Kevin, why didn’t you just call me?’ He said he had never thought of asking me then.”
When Wise charmed his way into the audition, Smith, 38, knew instantly that he had found his perfect devil. How wise.
“Kevin likes what I’ve done in the past,” says Wise. “We were doing this scene where my character was making chicken fried steak while talking a little bit about hell and what I wanted Sam to do,” Wise recounts. “I would throw in a few moves of my own and a word here and there and the script supervisor would say, ‘Well, that’s not in there!’ But Kevin would say, ‘That’s Leland Palmer. Let him do what he wants.’”
Well, the Ohio native has always known what he wanted in life. When he was 12, Wise decided that acting was his true calling. “I got an inkling of it in the fourth grade when I played a Christmas tree,” he laughs. “I just stood there and let them wrap the lights around me and put the ornaments on me and I didn’t have any words to say. But I felt really good just standing there. ... And the way the audience admired me kind of struck a chord with me.”
So Raymond Herbert Wise became a professional actor upon graduating from Kent State University in Ohio. At 23, he landed his first major TV role, playing an attorney in the long-running Love of Life. A slew of TV roles began to roll in, including in Dallas, The Colbys, Knots Landing and 24. The enormously gifted thespian also shone on the big screen, co-starring in George Clooney’s Oscar-nominated Good Night, and Good Luck.
But among the lot, Twin Peaks took the cake.
“Leland Palmer was so terrifying that sometimes he made me a little sick in my stomach as I was doing him,” he recalls. “And I remember the idea of Leland being his own daughter’s killer. It was hard for me to wrap my mind around that one. I didn’t want to be the killer.”
Funnily enough, he does want to be the devil. “It’s like Morgan Freeman playing God in Bruce Almighty, you know,” he chuckles. “It’s empowering. And when I walk into a scene, I do feel powerful.” (Note: Wise says it will be nicer if Catherine Zeta-Jones or Carol Burnett could play opposite him.)
So powerful is he that his co-stars describe him as “the grand daddy” on the set. “I guess I’m old enough to be one,” he laughs. “They kind of watch me out of the corner of their eyes to see how I do things.
“But I try to be hospitable and considerate to everyone. I try to keep it light. I try to joke. So I feel like that relationship between Sam and the devil is very much like the one Ray Wise has with the young kids in the cast. I try to tell them the good and bad things to do. And when I think they’re being a**holes, I let them know.”
But how devilish could Wise the person be? “Not anything that I can really call evil,” he winks. “I’ve probably been rude. For a couple of years, I had a pretty good road rage going. But it was mostly vocal. And a little bit of sign language too. But that’s as far as it went.”
> The first season of ‘Reaper’ currently airs on 8TV on Fridays, 10pm.
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