Ron Perlman is beloved by comic book fans for his pitch-perfect portrayal of Hellboy in the duo of cult movies directed by Guillermo del Toro. However, now that his days of playing the Right Hand of Doom are over, Perlman is ruling himself out of the race for another other superhero role in the future.
While speaking to ComicBook.com, the actor admitted that it wasn’t the superhero nature of Hellboy that appealed to him but his friend del Toro’s passion for the character and his world. As such, he’s not particularly desperate to dive into, say, the Marvel or DC universes. Especially, he says, because he feels he’s probably too old.
“Well, I’m not much of a comic book dude, so I don’t know who’s really out there. I didn’t find Hellboy, Guillermo [del Toro] found Hellboy and Guillermo just introduced Hellboy to me and infused me with his boyish fanboy obsession with the character. That’s what got me through that one. No, there’s no comic book character that I have identified that I’m dying to play. Plus, I don’t know if, at 68, I should even be educating the notion of superheroes anymore.”
Of course, despite Perlman’s claim that he’s not “a comic book dude,” he has a long history of superhero appearances thanks to his extensive voice acting in countless DC animated series. You might have heard him as Batman: The Animated Series‘ Clayface, Teen Titans‘s Deathstroke and The Batman’s Killer Croc. On top of those roles and Hellboy, he’s probably got enough superhero cred to call it a day now.
It’s just such a shame that he never realized his dream of completing his story as Big Red with a third movie, the grand finale to the trilogy that del Toro had planned but could never get the studio interested in. A new Hellboy film is in the works, of course, but it’s a reboot directed by Neil Marshall and starring Stranger Things‘ David Harbour. You can look for it to be summoned into cinemas on April 12th.
