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
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.
There's nothing more terrifying than an actor who comes with an idea.
I've done a lot of video games and stuff, and I'm getting better and better at it. I don't have a prejudice about it being a different medium.
When you think of all the things that have happened, since that problem with computers in 2000 and everybody was afraid and they were buying water, imagine what Millennium would do with all the things that are going on in the world right now. It has the capacity to be a movie. But, anyway, I loved doing it. It changed my life because the guy that I was playing was so much more educated and smarter than I was, so I had to live up to it.
I learned a lot. I really did. Millennium is a state of mind. I always thought of Frank Black as the greatest chess player that could take random pieces of information and string them together into a scenario that was accurate. I never thought of him as a psychic at all. We need people like that.
The only one that's appeared in my dreams is the one from Aliens. H.R. Giger's version of that Necronom was almost like a tic. It's reptilian. That creature is like a baby and tic combined. It's very frightening. It scared the hell out of me, it really did.
The only one that I think I could beat, if my life depended on it, would be the Predator. If it was in my territory, in my domain, with the guns that I've got, I think I could hurt him pretty bad. That's the only one, though. When you get into metaphysical creatures, they don't play fair.
When I was a kid, all of the parents and grandparents came out of the Depression Era. They were all freezing bread in their freezer, they were covering their sofas with plastic, and they had plastic runners on the floor. There was a great distance between them and anything authentic.
My whole childhood, that made my skin curl. I was looking for something authentic. I think that drove me into the arts, I really do. That really did it. The only other thing that made me survive, as a human being, was getting into the arts. I was surrounded by people that were very bright and they invited you in. They were gracious. So, it gave me a great education.
There's a potter that lived back in the 1800s, in Biloxi, Mississippi, and his name was George Ohr. He was of Russian descent, but they called him the "Mad Potter of Biloxi." I'd love to do a great character study and comedy about that guy's life. That would be my dream role. I know it's an oddball thing, but it's true. He lived at the turn of the century, in the 1800s.
When I'm making a movie, I never watch the dailies. I see the movie once and that's it. It's really not about that for me. It's not about the externals. When I'm on a set, I don't want to see it. I want to be subjective in it. That's my habit now.
I attribute that to the generosity of people that are in the entertainment business because they are all struggling. All roads seem to come to acting, for certain kinds of people that have a reason for being there. They want to be seen and heard, but there's more to it than that. There's a kindred spirit of struggling to find out, "What is this thing? What are we?" It's those eternal questions. But, in the meanwhile, I've met some wonderful people doing this.