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Calgary Herald (08/May/1989) - A new psycho is born

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A new psycho is born

Why would Tony Perkins, the man who gave showers and roadside motels a bad name in Psycho, want to star in a film called Edge of Sanity?

Having built his career playing assorted misfits and miscreants, Perkins doesn't exactly break new ground with the Victorian gothic-horror movie. He plays a combination of Jekyll and Hyde with a dose of Jack the Ripper thrown in.

But for Perkins, the role was perfect.

With refreshing candor, the 57-year-old actor says what he looks for in a part is getting a lot of screen time.

"The size of the part is tremendously important," he said in an interview. "You can flesh out a big part. A small part may be necessary to the plot and have interesting qualities, but it's not the same as one of the two leads.

"That's really what you want if you can possibly arrange it."

In Edge of Sanity (which opened to mediocre reviews and is due in Calgary soon), Perkins plays the legendary Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with an historical twist. Mr. Hyde's first name is Jack — of Jack the Ripper fame.

While working in his laboratory one night, Dr. Jekyll inhales some fumes from an anesthetic he is working on.

With a deadly white face and red-ringed eyes — Perkins called it a "slightly Iggy Pop-David Byrne look" — Jack Hyde prowls the streets of London, leaving carved up prostitutes in his wake.

Much to his delight, Perkins is in just about every scene.

"It sounds awfully acquisitive, but I have to be honest. Even with a long, straight, dull part, you say `What can I do to get down to the bottom of this and disenfranchise it from being long, straight and dull?"'

But the good doctor-mad killer part — already portrayed some 70 times on film — is far from straight and dull. It is the kind of nutcase Perkins has found himself almost inextricably linked with throughout his career.

As Norman Bates in Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock's tribute to motherhood and mayhem, Perkins won himself a special place by creating a homicidal maniac who was also vulnerable and tragic.

Since then he has gone on to portray at the very least unstable, often deranged, characters in films like Pretty Poison, Mahogany, Winter Kills, and Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion.

Typecasting is clearly not something that worries Perkins.

"I don't measure it in terms of what I've done before or what I'll do later. It's just all about what you're doing right then.

"That could be the concern of someone who doesn't really get off on acting. You know, actors will find every reason to withdraw, to hide and to not work."

In person, Perkins is every bit as wired as he often appears on screen. The double expresso he orders in the Palm Court of New York's Plaza Hotel seems like the last thing he needs.

Perhaps the caffeine bolsters him for a barrage of interviews? But Perkins says he has done comparatively little promotion for Edge of Sanity.

"For me a lot would be to tour the world, to go to every God-forsaken corner and if necessary thumbtack a sheet to the back of an old garage and have a private screening for a couple of Arabs crouched under a jeep," he says in the grandiloquent style of speech he tends to lapse into.

However, he recognizes that "tub-thumping for films by actors or by whoever, by a squad of trained Lippizaner stallions, is never going to sell one ticket or keep one ticket from being bought."

As he walks the line between waxing eloquent and theatrical, Perkins often gazes into the distance as he formulates his thoughts.

Perkins is happy to talk about coming projects, which include his just-completed television pilot as "the world's most succesful mystery writer." It sounds like a hybrid of the Addams Family and the Brady Bunch, tempered by James Thurberesque intrusions of the writer's characters into his life.

Perkins' fourth go-round as the guy with the ultimate Oedipus complex in Psycho IV is being written by Joseph Stefano, who wrote the original. It will examine the story of Norman Bates as a young boy and adolescent.

Perkins said he would like to direct the film, as he did Psycho III. He said he hopes the fourth chapter will make him feel "that overpowering urge, that itchy, burning sensation" he gets from a good script that compells him to want to direct.

Of course, he can't hope to top the 1960 classic directed by Hitchcock, for whom Perkins has nothing but praise. "He was always there for you, always ready to collaborate, and wonderfully generous with his experience and his genius."

Told that some actors who worked under Hitchcock were not so full of praise, Perkins responds with a staccato: "I have no comments to make on other peoples' experiences or quotes. Why would I? Why should I? Why would you ask me for it?"

Norman, is that you?

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