Actor Michael Chiklis loved his role as the ever-lovin’, blue-eyed Thing in the first “Fantastic Four” movie, except for one small thing–the suit that transformed him into the Thing.
During the first shoot, the costume took hours to put on, and while it was on, Chiklis couldn’t easily make his way to the bathroom.
“The first time really was unhealthful, being trapped in a suit for 12 hours and sweating and not being able to get out,” Chiklis said. “And this time I was able to get in and out of the costume at will.”
This time around, the production team was aware of Chilkis’s complaints and able to make the costume more comfortable for the actor.
“They really reworked it entirely,” Chiklis said in an interview. “I think they were all brutally aware of my — what do I call it? — my condition, my plight. They were very good about wanting to improve it for me.”
“[It was] much easier because I was familiar with it,” Chiklis said. “And they even made [the mask] out of a little bit lighter-grade prosthetic so that it was more malleable, and I was able to move it more easily. The other one was sort of a little tight, so I had to work the face in before I started shooting. I had to do all these facial exercises to get the thing working for me, whereas this one was very pliable and soft, and it could work very well with my face.”
Chilkis and the rest of his “Fantastic” co-stars light up the silver-screen Friday with the release of “Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer.”
When USA’s hit series “The Dead Zone” returns Sunday night, fans of the long-running summer-time series may notice a change.
For the show’s sixth season, production moved from Vancouver to Montreal, according to series star Anthony Michael Hall.
Hall said the change has been good for a lot of reasons. “It’s been nice to take it to a new city and have all those production changes occur,” Hall said. “Like, we have a new writing staff, new directors, a new cinematographer, all these things that keep it fresh. It makes it new in a way. And at the same time, it’s been a challenge from a production standpoint of catching this whole French-Canadian crew up to speed on how we do the show. But they’ve all adapted really well.”
The shows sixth season promises to be a mixture of the Stillson arc along with stand-alone stories. Hall says he is excited about the new scope of stories that will be told this season.
“We follow the mythology of the show and those things, but what’s great is that we can do episodes that are inspired by movies or more of the classic detective stuff you see on C.S.I. or Law and Order,” Hall said. “So that I’m grateful for. Because it gives us the latitude to take chances, and it keeps it interesting.”
Being in a new city has also inspired different kinds of stories and ideas that wouldn’t have been possible anywhere else. “Montreal is a very modern city, but it’s also very European,” Hall said. “So it has, like, a whole other vibe to it, because there’s a lot of places to shoot. For example, we’re doing an episode that will be like a film noir throwback. My character meets a kind of femme fatale on a train, and it turns out she’s kind of a con artist, and it’s called ‘Switch.’ I have all these visions of her, because she’s running from one guy trying to con another guy. And then I have a horrible vision of her meeting her end on this train. So what we did, for example, is we found this place that has all these antique trains, like a train museum basically. And we built this episode around the idea that we wanted to do sort of a film noir, Casablanca-esque episode.”
The sixth season of “The Dead Zone” kicks off this Sunday (June 17) at 10 p.m. EST on USA, right after the season-premiere of “The 4400.”
From: SCI FI.com:
Jessica Alba, who reprises the role of Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman in the upcoming sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, told SCI FI Wire that both the character and the film’s story are more mature the second time around. In the follow-up, the Fantastic Four are in the midst of celebrating the wedding of Sue and Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd), when the alien herald the Silver Surfer arrives on Earth to bring about the planet’s demise.
“It wasn’t necessarily Bridezilla,” Alba said about playing the bride-to-be in an interview in London over the weekend. “But it was fun playing with the anxiety of ‘Wow, I’m making this decision that’s going to affect the rest of my life’ and really toying with the idea of ‘Do I want to be a career woman or do I want to be a family woman?’ And I think a lot of women feel that pressure and were overachievers who want it all. So I like that. It was fun to play someone that I feel like I could relate to, and I know a lot of women can.”
Alba added that the sequel will skew a bit older than the first movie, which appealed to younger audiences. “When parents go and watch this or when young professional women or teenage girls who are thinking about what they may be like when they’re older go see this, they can probably relate to Sue more,” she said.
Alba said that Sue Storm is more complicated this time around. “In the first one, she was always kind of nagging, and she was one-note,” Alba said. “And in this one she’s much more human.” Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer opens on June 15.
“The Incredible Hulk” had added another cast member. This time Oscar-nominee William Hurt joins the cast as General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Ross is the father of love-interest Betty Ross, who is played by Liv Tyler. Ross is also obsessed with bringing down the Hulk and could serve as another antognist to the Green Goliath in the upcoming film.
Hurt joins an impressive cast for the upcoming film, including Ed Norton as Bruce Banner, Tyler as Betty Ross and Tim Roth as the Ambomination (though as we previously reported, he won’t be called that in the film).
Filming on the second “Hulk” films begins in Toronto later this year.
For months, we’ve been teasing you (and ourselves) with information about this Sunday’s big “Robot Chicken” episode that will lovingly parody the “Star Wars” saga.
This morning, USA Today has a few more tidbits to whet your appetite for the show and make fans continue to countdown hours until the speical airs Sunday night at 10 p.m. EST on Cartoon Network.
“We had done a couple of Star Wars sketches and got the attention of George Lucas and were invited to a meeting,” said creator Seth Green. “The people at Lucasfilm realized you could do a comedic take on Star Wars without compromising the integrity of any dramatic take.”
Lucas became aware of the show’s poking fun at “a galaxy far, far away” when he saw the famous clip of Vader calling the Emperor after the Death Star was destroyed on-line. Lucas liked what he saw and found the short sketch amusing.
“We thought what they did with the Emperor was quite funny and thought it would be a perfect fit if they wanted to do a parody of Star Wars,” said Tom Warner, Lucasfilm’s senior director of marketing.
Lucas was so impressed that he agreed to take part in the episode, supplying his own voice for a sketch in which a George Lucas figure gets trapped in an elevator with an overzealous fan.
Green said, “We thought if we could get George to do it, it was worth doing.”
Green and co-creator Matt Senreich visited Lucasfilm to pitch ideas for the special.
“There were definitely a few in there I batted an eye at, and if I were producing probably wouldn’t have put it,” said Warner. “But they were having fun with it.”
Among other Robot Chicken: Star Wars moments: Luke gets intimate with Leia; Jar Jar Binks (voiced by the original, Ahmed Best) reunites with Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader; in the cantina, the big walrus-faced man who bumps into Luke says, in subtitles, “I really like your hair. Where do you get it done?”; and President Bush discovers that he has The Force.
“The idea of him running mad with superpower made us all laugh,” says Green, who voices dozens of characters.
And in case you miss the special in its original time slot, Cartoon Network has got your back. The special will air at the top of every hour from 10 p.m. Sunday night to 6 a.m. EST on Monday.
Rumor has it that screener copies of the episode have been seen by various people, including USA Today’s Pop Candy writer, Whitney Matheson. All I have to ask is–did we get one at the DracoVista studios and I missed it?
That’s all for now and may the Force be with you — live long and prosper…er, whatever!