One of Britain's most versatile character actors, Paul Freeman's dark, hypnotic good looks and talent for accents have often seen him cast as villains. He originally worked first in advertising and then he trained as a teacher, while he participated in amateur dramatics as a pastime. As a professional actor he gained extensive experience ...
[on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (1995)] You're acting behind a mask, and that mask gives you enormous freedom. It means you can play the whole part completely off the wall. So my style of acting is completely over the top and exaggerated - it's like nothing else you've seen in the last 100 years. My last role before this was in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' in [London's] Regents Park, wearing a purple costume and playing Oberon, king of the fairies. So it really was as if I trained for six months to play [Ooze].
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I think the trick for British actors when they work in Hollywood is not to take it all too seriously.
3
[on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)] Both Steven [Steven Spielberg] and George Lucas told me at the time they wanted me back for a sequel, then said they needed new characters. I could see their point - if the hero stays the same, you don't want the same villain, too.
4
[on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (1995)] The script developed as we were making it, and at one point the producer Suzanne Todd would be sitting in the corner on set, writing the script on her laptop. In the middle of speaking lines, I'd get handed rewrites, and a producer would say: 'Here, say this instead.'
5
[on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (1995)] From what I've seen, it's innocuous. There's a lot of kung fu fighting, but you never see blood or indeed any impact. It's a bit like those Bruce Lee films, but without all the grunting and groaning.
6
My parents came from Camden Town, so I used to have a North London accent - that was my real voice. It's easy to slip back into the dialect, though, and nice to get back into it - it's like coming home.
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Monarch of the Glen (2000) got me into hill-walking, which I now like as well as gardening and listening to music. It's important to have other interests, so that if work does dry up I've got other interests to fall back on.
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[on When I'm Sixty-Four (2004)] I'd never worked with Tony [Tony Grounds] before, but I read the script and I thought, 'What beautiful writing'. It's a terribly well written script: everyone is decent, the things that are sad are the everyday tragedies of life. Nothing is manipulated - including the humour - and the people aren't evil. It's also important to me how people view people of my age. My dad had retired by my age and people of his generation were looking forward to retirement. But I don't feel like retiring.
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[Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (1995)] They've borrowed shamelessly from just about every children's story. Ivan Ooze becomes a Pied Piper figure, luring children away from their parents to a world of total irresponsibility where everyone throws purple gunk at each other. But there's a strangely redemptive ending in which the parents and children recognize what they've missed in each other. Which I can only approve of, of course.
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[on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (1995)] Power Rangers was a completely chaotic production. The producer kept me in prosthetics for much longer than I should have been so my face swelled up and that stopped production, and they tried to cheat me out of the money... The stories about it were endless. In the end, you know, it's a perfectly serviceable kids' movie. And I'm rather good in it.
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I was very happy to be typecast, I got a lot of work out of it. That lasted for a few years and then I got fed up because it became a train of playing Nazis. One year I played the commandant of Auschwitz and the commandant of Birkenau in the same year, and I thought, 'What's my career becoming? Am I waiting to play Hitler? I don't think so.' So I said, "No more Nazis."
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[on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)] They said, "Here's the script, go away, read it and see what you think." I read it and loved it. It was the monkey with the date that really got me.
$15 Million
