Series: Hellboy II

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The three faces of Doug Jones in 'Hellboy II'

Actor Doug Jones talked about the challenges in playing three roles, Abe Sapien, The Angel of Death, and The Chamberlain, in 'Hellboy II: The Golden Army'.

The way he creates the different physicality of the characters, "has to come organically for me and from the character. When I read the script, when I get the story and get the character down from the script and the story as I am reading that is my first invitation to let the character in. I open up this chest cavity and say, 'Please come. I want to play you so please come in here and start working with me.' The next step is meeting with the director, finding out what his storytelling is, what his vision is for the film."

Of course, for an actor like Jones getting into character isn't just an intellectual feat, but a highly physical one as well.

"The next step after that is to take all the information, all that heart and soul that I have ingested to the gym. I will go to my 24-hour gym late at night when no one is there. I will go into the aerobics room where all the mirrors and I will start looking at myself as though I were the character.

"How does he walk? How does he talk? How does he gesture? Is he afraid of something? Does the script call for me to crawl up and runaway around a trashcan and up a wall? I have to take all that into consideration. I start getting his physicality down, but I don't want the physicality to come from, it looks nice with an elbow here and a hand there. I want to come from that heart and soul that I've ingested. So that right now I am talking and gesturing. I don't think about my gestures. I am thinking about communicating with you, and I want my characters to do the exact same thing."

In 'Hellboy II: The Golden Army' the Angel of Death is a great winged creature whose lack of eyes on his face is more than made up for by the dozens of eyes that line his wings.

This character required "five hours of make-up which was gorgeous and creepy all at the same time I loved the Angel of Death character, I loved it. It was one of those characters much like the fawn from 'Pan's Labyrinth' I had the blessing of playing, which was ambiguity. Male? Female? Not sure. Creepy-looking or beautiful? A little bit of both. Scary or nurturing and helpful? A little bit of both.

"I love those characters that keep you guessing. That and with the make-up and the costume was a five-hour getting-ready process but was so beautiful though I lived the character. You can't play that character without five hours of makeup therefore I appreciate the process."

But a long spell in the makeup chair was actually the least of Jones' concerns.

"The challenge for the Angel of Death was forty pounds of wings on my back. They were not CG. You were looking at something that was filmed on camera that day on my back," Jones said. "If you put 40 lbs. in the middle of your spine, you're gonna feel it, so because they were not CG at all, all of the movement of the wings was mechanical and puppeteered and all of the eyes were mechanical and puppeteered by guys off camera going [makes whirring noise] with a joystick."

Jones went into the filming of the character intending to carry the weight but soon realized he had a problem.

"I was losing my sense of humor, I was losing my ability to stand, I was losing my character. I finally said I am going to burst into tears if we don't alleviate this weight somehow and so they did get a cable that," Jones mimes himself getting pulled up by an imaginary cable and then breathes sigh of relief, "my humor came back, my butterflies were flying around my heard. It was a beautiful thing. That became a simple matter of erasing a cable in post-production, so that was a particular challenge for the Angel of Death."

Early on in the film, Jones also appears as The Chamberlain, the gatekeeper at the royal chamber where the Elf king sits on his throne. The character is quite tall with long, stick-like fingers. Jones admits he found the process of playing this character "isolating."

"I connect with [Abe Sapien] probably the most out of anyone because he and I are very much alike. I need to feel my hands. I can see you much better when I can touch you," said Jones. "Abe is the same way. He is very, very tactile. He can tell where this glass was made and where it came from and whose been drinking out of it by touching it. That's the way I am too. I must feel things."

For "the Chamberlain my hands were mechanical; the fingers were extremely long and spindly. That was done puppeteered. What we would do is we would rehearse the Chamberlain with my hands up here, gesturing. 'Oh, hello, sire.' I would go through all that. The puppeteers, [who] were watching me on film would hold the elbows down here on the Chamberlain, and I puppeteered [the elbows] and the puppeteers did [the hands and fingers] so that was a concert that needed to happen between lots of people.

"It took some rehearsal time. Particularly challenging were those hands. My gosh. Not being able to touch with my own hands, that was isolating for me. The other thing that was isolating was the face of the Chamberlain, the eyes were up here and it was like I was, 'Hello, I am in a cave. All by myself. I am lonely!' And I had this one little hole, a beauty mark they put in my face so I had one eye so I had," Jones demonstrats his view by holding his hands together so there's just a narrow space between them, "that was my field of vision all day. Someone would come up and say there's standing here 'Hi, Doug' I'm like [turns his body] 'Oh, Hi. It was just virtually impossible to communicate so that was a tough week."

Yet all the hard work paid off both for the film and Jones as an actor.

"By the time I got finished filming 'Hellboy II: The Golden Army,' (I use the whole title)--by the time I got finished with it, I realized that a part of my soul was missing. I was spent. It was a long grueling shoot for all of us. I have never been that depleted and that tired; however; as an artist, as an actor, I have been that fulfilled and that satisfied with a job ever. Part of it was playing three characters, part of it was having the opportunity to jump into three different personalities in one movie, part of it was that the one of those was Abe Sapien coming back bigger and better and more layered and colorful than ever before. Satisfying."

Go see the three faces of Doug Jones in 'Hellboy II: The Golden Army', the #1 movie in theaters today.