National Post (National Edition)
Man behind monster in The Shape of Water becomes a star.
MONSTER-MOVIE VETERAN’S TALENTS RISE TO SURFACE IN THE SHAPE OF WATER
Awhirlwind love story, The Shape of Water is this year’s Best Picture winner, taking home four Academy Awards — including Best Director for Guillermo del Toro.
But what about that dashing hero embracing Oscarnominated actress Sally Hawkins on the poster? Not a sausage. Just because he’s hidden behind layers of slime, gills and fishscales, the Academy unfortunately turned a blind eye to Doug Jones — despite critics falling over themselves to praise his moving performance as the film’s fishy hero.
The Shape of Water, which traces the stirring emotions between a mute cleaning woman and a sea monster in the laboratory she cleans, is hardly your conventional romance and Jones is hardly your conventional leading man. Rather, he is a modern-day equivalent to Lon Chaney, the silent era star dubbed “a man of a thousand faces” for how he transformed himself into a variety of monsters using his own expert knowledge of makeup.
Jones has also had a career in disguise, donning prosthetics to play zombies, fauns, and other fantastical beasts, most notably in the films of del Toro, with whom he has worked six times, taking lead roles in Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy, among others.
But The Shape of Water’s Amphibian Man is far and away his greatest acting achievement — one undertaken with no dialogue under elaborate makeup that took three years to design and three hours a day to apply, leaving him near-blind for most of his scenes and unable to use the bathroom. Certainly, what he endured for the role puts most other Oscar-grabbing antics (Leonardo DiCaprio and his raw bison liver eating in The Revenant, say) to shame.
Jones, 57, is too polite to grumble about the Oscars snub, but he wishes things were as they were in Hollywood past when, following Chaney’s success, monsters were seen as meaty, complex roles.
“In the golden era of monsters, of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price, these horror icons were allowed to wear heavy makeup and be touted as movie stars at the same time,” he tells me. “We lost that somewhere along the way. Monsters became something that chased women in underwear down corridors.” Jones is on a oneman crusade to change that, with the perfect partner in del Toro. “He’s the one who brought the old monster movie back.”
So just how do you go about making a wordless fish-man a romantic hero, then? “Guillermo said, ‘Sprinkle some matador in there.’ I totally got it,” says Jones. “Matadors are sexy! They lead with the hips.” The irony is that Jones doesn’t have much in the way of hips to lead with. At 6-foot-4 and whippet thin, he is, as del Toro has joked, “blessed with no shoulders and no ass. Like a wire armature with a sense of humour.” It is this lithe frame that is at the core of his particular gift for playing the otherworldly: as in The Shape of Water, he is capable of extraordinary, balletic movements like few other actors could master.
The physical challenges for The Shape of Water included an exhausting Fred Astairestyle dance sequence. Waltzing with webbed feet is far from easy, but even tougher was a love scene that took place entirely underwater, with Jones and Hawkins rushing to the surface to gasp for air between takes. In this context, says Jones, “acting” meant training himself to think “I’m in the water, this is where I live,” rather than “I can’t breathe, it’s been 30 seconds and I’m going to die.”
As for the emotional side of the role, he says he had to create his own vocabulary. “Guillermo was very good at reminding me, ‘You’re an animal from the wild — I don’t want to see any human reactions, no human responses, non-verbally.’ I had to find the instincts of the family dog instead. When you talk to the dog, he has his own way of getting back to you. He’ll put his ears up or tilt his head or arf, or something, so I had to find what that system would be for me.”
Success has been a long time coming for Jones. At college in Indiana, he joined an amateur mime troupe called Mime Over Matter, and became the mascot for the school basketball team, a dancing bird. That bird was the first step toward a lifetime of anonymous roles in “big, floppy suits.”
“For the first 20 years of my career, I was working all the time and completely unknown in public. It wasn’t a horrible gig,” says Jones, “but I used to get sidelined quite a bit.”
Things changed only when he met del Toro. They first crossed paths on the 1997 thriller Mimic, but Jones’s breakthrough came in 2004 with their next collaboration, playing another fishman — Abe Sapien, the sidekick to comic-book hero Hellboy, a demon-turned-sleuth.
Hellboy’s success helped Jones land his first headline role in a blockbuster — as the eponymous surfing alien in 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. He spent long hours in postproduction perfecting the character’s voice, mixing a deep superhero rumble with a ghostly whisper. The result, “a beautiful, ethereal sound”, remains one of his proudest achievements. Two days after the team finished recording, Jones saw a story in the paper: “Laurence Fishburne will provide the voice of the Silver Surfer.” Nobody had told him.
“It was ...” Jones stops, weighing his words carefully, “an unfortunate surprise.” It’s clear he is still deeply hurt. It wasn’t the first time he’d had his voice edited out; in Hellboy, he was overdubbed by Frasier’s David Hyde Pierce, but del Toro had the good grace to phone him and break the news personally. The director promised it would never happen again — a promise he kept when Jones returned for Hellboy 2, voice intact.
Since then, there’s been a clause in all Jones’s contracts to protect his voice — a demand he now finds easier to make, thanks to his raised profile. “Years ago, they didn’t quite know what to do with me. The studios thought, ‘Well, it’s just a guy in a suit’.” Over time, he has gone from being a guy in a suit to the guy in a suit. “Now that the studios come looking for me to do that Doug Jones ‘brand’ of creature, it’s allowed my price tag to go up a smidge,” he adds.
It puts him on a par with Andy Serkis, Hollywood’s other great invisible star, who has disappeared behind computer-generated imagery to play Gollum, King Kong and Star Wars villain Snoke. After following each other’s work closely for a decade, the pair finally met at a comic-book convention a couple of years ago.
“When I introduced myself, he flung his arms around me, threw his head back and laughed,” says Jones. “He and I agreed that we both did the same kind of thing: we’re both actors. If you’re playing a human in a T-shirt and jeans, or a monster with a tail coming out of his ass, you still have to channel the heart and soul of that character.”
Still, for all his monster evangelism, Jones is itching do some more straight drama. “I did a Hallmark Channel movie a couple of years ago that I just loved — The Ultimate Legacy. I played Raquel Welsh’s butler, in a beautiful countryside estate. I drove an old Rolls-Royce and wore a three-piece suit with a bow-tie. I was in the makeup trailer for 10 minutes a day! I could open a can of soda with my own hands! And my own mouth!” He lets out a gasp of ecstasy. “Oh, it was wonderful!”