He spent 25 years hiding behind prosthetics before anyone learned his name, and he's spent the decades since making sure nobody forgets it.
At a glance
- Known for
- Hellboy, Clay Morrow on *Sons of Anarchy*, and the voice of Fallout's "War never changes"
- Before fame
- Weighed 300 pounds at 13 and got bullied for his size in Washington Heights
- Off-screen
- Co-founded Asylm Studios and Watrfall to give creators equity and fans a vote
Rise to Fame
Prosthetics were his way in. He's said they were "the only way I could get work when I was a young actor," a curtain between himself and the camera. His film debut in Quest for Fire had him grunting through a caveman role without dialogue. The Name of the Rose put him in a makeup chair for 12.5 hours to play a hunchback opposite Sean Connery.
Rick Baker pushed his name for the lead in CBS's Beauty and the Beast, and he won a Golden Globe in 1989. Guillermo del Toro spent four years fighting the studio to cast him as Hellboy because they wanted a bigger name. Del Toro didn't budge. The 2004 film made him a household name at 53, after more than two decades of disappearing into latex.
In the Spotlight
The guy who spent decades behind prosthetics now can't stop showing his face. He called Ron DeSantis a "fucking Nazi pig" on video and challenged Ted Cruz to a $50,000 fight for Black Lives Matter. During the SAG-AFTRA strike, he told a crowd at Walt Disney Studios he'd been "a union man my entire motherfucking woke life."
The business side runs in the same direction. He co-founded Watrfall, a fan-led film financing platform, and launched Asylm Studios with equitable profit-sharing. The loudest mouth in Hollywood is trying to build something that doesn't need Hollywood's permission.
Side Notes
Every Fallout game opens the same way: "War. War never changes." He's narrated most of the Fallout series since 1997 (every mainline entry except Fallout 4) and has never played a single one. He doesn't play games. He just opens them. He's joked he got paid "$40 and a sandwich" for the original recording, and for Fallout 3, the developers made him say the line about 40 times with different cadences.
A kid who weighed 300 pounds at 13, bullied for how he looked, grew up to deliver a line that gamers can recite from memory. He doesn't need the prosthetics anymore, but the pattern hasn't changed: the less you see of him, the more he sticks.