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apocryphal, as the actor now insists he was never offered the role. "If you play Doctor Who, that means five to seven years of your life, so I couldn't go on my expeditions, and there are so many other parts I want to play." And so how would Blessed have played the role if given the opportu- nity? The answer will surprise - and probably outrage - a few people. "If I played the Doctor, people said, 'Well, you could play it gregarious, wonder- ful, larger than life, yet delicate and se- rious and very mature as well,' but I al- ways saw Doctor Who as [Blessed adopts a soft, oriental accent] actually oriental, almost like Charlie Chan." Is this a send-up? Blessed has a fairly wicked sense of humour, but in this case he appears to be totally serious. "I saw him as very differ- ent and enigmatic," the actor con- tinues. "He's not Japanese, but you can't put your finger on it, there's an alien quality about him, more of a strange, mystic quality. I'd have played it like that, with a kind of samurai wig, not dissimi- lar to the makeup I had as King Yrcanos, but very oriental and quiet and strange." As mentioned earlier, this visit to America is just a momentary hiccup in Blessed's busy schedule. As he begins to reveal his plans for the next two to three years, it's enough to make you wonder if one man could possible do it all. Ghostly Revolution
"When I leave here, I"m being fit-ted for the most spectacular special effect in any movie ever. I'm doing Ken Branagh's Hamlet, playing the ghost, the full version. They're mak- ing me half a mile high, seven feet high; at one point, they're making me as a bronze statue that moves about. It's going to be completely revolutionary, and they're spending a tre- mendous amount of money on the spe- cial FX. There are going to be scenes of me before I'm a ghost, winning my bat- tles in single combat, incredibly heroic, like Moses cum Zeus or Hercules, with great irridescent armour like Batman. "When I've done that, I'm going back to Everest for 12 weeks and I'm getting about 25 million for the rain forests, the tiger, the gorilla and the elephant; you can't go to Everest for yourself. CNN are covering it live by satellite, and in Brit- ain, ITN are going to cover me for 15 weeks, eight times a day live. If it was a |
young man, it wouldn't have the same effect, but because I'm 58 and I'm going to attempt it without oxygen, which the experts say is utterly impossible, it's a dif- ferent matter. "After that, I'm going to direct my first film, Macbeth in a very exciting, different way. Then, I'm going on a Yeti expedition in southeren Russia, come back and do the final check-ups on Macbeth, and go to the Antarctic to direct a film called Ice which is about Shackleton, and it looks as though Mel Gibson is going to play him." Martian Invasion
These aren't just pipe dreams, and Blessedsays the money is already in place for vir-  tually all of those projects. The one that will be of special interest to SF fans is a possible big-budget remake of H G Wells' War of the Worlds, which Blessed plans to direct. "A long time ago, Paramount invited peo- ple to submit treatments for it, and I sent in a 38-page treatment, completely as the book, Victorian England, with the penny- farthing bikes and everything. "They threw all the treatments out and called me and said, 'Where do you want to film it?' I said Shepperton Studios, be- cause they have some really big stages there, and I want to build at least three of the big machines to size. The rest will be miniatures, and of course we're very near to where it all took place in Shepperton. |
"I also said, 'It mustn't be 20th century or 30th or 40th centure; it must be the Victorian,' and my treatment says, 'If you want to change this, you can all f*** off!' If they want to change it, it would be a waste of time and energy, it will be a disaster and will go down the drain. "They loved all that, and came back to me saying, 'This will be about a 40 million venture,' and I said, 'No, it doesn't have to be that much,' so we're at that stage at the moment. I've writ- ten the whole script, and it is now 80% there. It's going to be very moving, but very spectacular." It seems ironic that in order to create the realism of Wells' Victorian battle- ground, Blessed needs to utilize to- day's state-of-the-art technology. The actor is no stranger to the world of high-tech, having just finished a massive CD-ROM project this past year. "It's called The Darkening, or The Dark Side, now. They spent a tremendous amount of money on it, with huge sets, and I played a kind of magician in it, but I had to play the character in 20 differ- ent ways - live, dead, hero, villian - and the public has to decided the game. It's very high-powered; ap- parently, if you can solve this in 60 hours, then you're almost as advanced as Einstein. It's going to take most people two years to play this game, or six months if they're very clever. HoloBrian
"I've also just recorded a holo-gram for Australia, playing an elec- tric messiah for The Ruling Class. They recorded it in London, with me 30 feet high. I'm on stage every night in Brisbane, as real as I'm sit- ting here now." While new technology may be well and good if you're climbing Everest, creating a Martian invasion, or even creating an impressive ghost in Ham- let, Brian Blessed says it may be worth keeping a wary eye on where this is all going. "I played John Freeman in Me- tropolis," he notes, "and sang that first song, 'The machines are beautiful, more perfect than man, and they must be kept going any way that they can,' and so Freeman built Metropolis, but is that really what we want? Where it is all going now I don't think there's anything to fear, but that's what we have to keep an eye on." |
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