Lance Henriksen
Lance Henriksen
Lance James Henriksenis an American actor and artist, best known for his roles in science fiction, action, and horror films such as Bishop in the Alien film franchise, and Frank Black in Fox television series Millennium. Henriksen is also notable for his voice acting, notably having voiced Kerchak the gorilla in Walt Disney Animation Studios' Tarzan...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Actor
Date of Birth5 May 1940
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Growing up, I think I always had a sense of art: a sense that there was poetry in the world. I didn't know where I was going to find it. I didn't know where I was going to fit in, that was for sure. But I kept moving forward. There wasn't a future in anything other than movement.
As a kid, there was a painting of 'Appeal to the Great Spirit' that I would see when I would get oatmeal bowls out of the cupboard. This painting, it was so real to me that it frightened me.
What's frustrating to me is when, on a low-budget movie, people don't take chances. A big-budget movie, that script's your bible; nobody's going to risk going off the page. But when you're doing a very low-budget film, why not take some chances, intellectually, artistically?
In the late 1960s, I ended up in Telluride, Colorado. It wasn't like the country club that it is now. It was very raw. Skiing was there, but snowboarders have now entirely overrun it.
I'm a good guy. I love playing bad guys, but good guys that have a good thing going on, I like that, too. I don't like passive good guys.
You know something, if you're not acting, you're not an actor - you've gotta work. No way around it.
But to this day - I'm very literate now, I love to read, I read constantly - words don't resonate the way they do to a person with a formal education. They're like a maze, a puzzle that has to be opened up.
Usually the male control and domination that tends to be in our genes gets around a powerful woman who has the ability to make choices different from guys, it throws you off and you get frustrated.
I ride really well and I shoot a gun really well. I love the genre. Once I did Westerns, I was hooked. I love them, but there's been very few of them made. I never wanted to play a guy who was acting like a cowboy. I wanted to play someone who had a real life, but was also trapped into situations.
If I would had been born years earlier, I would have been in all the Westerns. It's just the way that the industry goes. But now, we are in an age of a lot of different kinds of fears, and you have the science fiction and horror genres doing our morality plays the same way that they would have done in Westerns. I absolutely accept it. In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.
I might go visit it one day, but I couldn't do any more than just visit. I love it, don't get me wrong, but it's just too big. I'm going to be at a lot of other conventions this year, with the book and everything.
It's always the last one because it's so present in your body. I liked Scream of the Banshee because it was a real challenge. I thought, "How am I going to pull off this character?" But, I also thought, "Oh, man, I'm going to go for it." He's got all the defects of character that an actor loves to play. So, I had a really great time.
I'm not Tom Cruise. I don't have to look that good. I'm always going to have a problem because I'm thought of as someone edgy, but I'm not. I'm a cupcake.
Although, people make mistakes in their lives, and you could say that the mistakes make us who we are, by how we respond to them. I just don't want to play boring good guys.