Ron Perlman Terrified A Harry Potter Star
Rupert Grint revealed it was "terrifying" and "intimidating" when he got to meet Ron Perlman.
Ron Perlman has built an awesome career off of playing one badass after another, from a mafioso in Drive to everyone’s favorite red demon, Hellboy. And as it turns out, Perlman is just as skilled at intimidating his fellow actors as he is at intimidating audiences with his fierce performances. In an interview with PopSugar, Harry Potter star Rupert Grint said that meeting Perlman when they were both starring in the 2015 film Moonwalkers was “terrifying” and that he was “so intimidated and nervous” when they were introduced.
Amusingly enough, Rupert Grint played a kind of everyman wizard Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter films, and he ended up having the same reaction many of us would have to meeting Ron Perlman. “He’s Hellboy,” Grint said, and we must admit: if you mostly associate someone with a scary demon from Hell they once played, then meeting that demon in person must be quite intimidating. Fortunately, it didn’t take Grint long to learn that Perlman is nothing like his demonic alter ego and is, in fact, a pretty cool guy to hang with.
According to Grint, once he spent some time with Ron Perlman, he realized that the older actor was “so sweet, so much fun, and so funny.” Again, playing the everyman, Grint then said what everyone was thinking: “you don’t equate him with comedy.” And it’s true: most filmmakers have leaned into how much of a frightening presence Perlman has onscreen, which is why he almost always gets cast as a monstrous character of some stripe or another.
After Grint shared some scenes with Ron Perlman, though, he realized that the actor was quite the comedian when the camera wasn’t rolling, and even when it was. The younger actor specifically referenced a scene from the movie where his character and Perlman’s character are tripping on acid. Grint said that it took them many hours to film this scene because “we couldn’t hold it together,” meaning that the two kept cracking each other up during filming.
Of course, when it came to Moonwalkers, it might be fair to say that Perlman was playing the funny guy on set because he was embracing the chance to finally demonstrate his comedic chops. The movie is a kind of crime comedy that focuses on conspiracies related to the moon landing, which naturally lends itself to some sublimely absurd performances. And the premise of the movie is that Perlman plays a CIA agent who must hire legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick to fake the moon landing (which is simultaneously one of the craziest and most prevalent conspiracies about the moon landing).
That film wasn’t exactly a big hit with critics, but it sounds like it provided Rupert Grint the perfect opportunity to bond with Ron Perlman. Grint was always selective about the roles he took post-Potter, and it seems like he must have really been drawn to the dark comedy of this screenplay. And now that the man who famously played Ron Weasley seems to be focusing on a television career (he has spent the last few years starring in the TV show Servant), we can only hope for a Ron Perlman small-screen cameo to bring these two friends back together.
