I’m the man inside the monster
He’s the star of Oscars favourite The Shape Of Water... but you wouldn’t know it
The star of the year’s hottest film is sitting in the Four Seasons Hotel, Los Angeles. A few feet away, the likes of Steven Spielberg and Wonder Woman’s Gal Gadot are battling their way past fans outside the American Film Institute’s annual lunch. Yet none of the fans has registered that sipping a cola next to me is the star of The Shape Of Water, which has 13 Oscar nominations. Doug Jones is less leading man than leading monster, and after 31 years acting ‘under rubber bits, largely anonymously’, he’s not used to the limelight. ‘The Shape Of Water is directed by Guillermo del Toro, who made Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy, with whom Jones has been working since playing a giant cockroach in 1997’s Mimic. It’s part sci-fi love story, part Cold War thriller, with British actress Sally Hawkins as a mute worker at a military installation in Sixties Baltimore who’s drawn to a shackled, water-dwelling ‘asset’ discovered in the Amazon. His costume for The Shape Of Water was three years in the making. ‘The lips and the body had to be resculpted several times to get that perfect shape from every angle,’ says Jones. ‘The lips had to be kissable, the ass had to be grabable!’ Jones and wife Laurie arrived in LA in 1985. He trained as a mime artist and contortionist, but was determined to be an actor. His first big break was in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992): ‘That small role – six scenes maybe – changed my life,’ he says. He has barely stopped working since, and is now a zen master at coping with the punishing five-hour make-up routines. ‘I get called three hours before everyone else, pre-dawn, first one in, last one out. It can make your days insufferable, but I said yes to this, so I have to get on with it.’
The Shape Of Water’ is out on Valentine’s Day.