Actor Ron Perlman has made being recognised by the public into a little game. "I'm saying, 'This one is going to say Name Of The Rose because he looks intellectual and bookish. And this one's going to say Police Academy, because he looks like a total degenerate'."

Mostly, as on his current European tour to promote Hellboy, people think he's singer Tom Waites. But the chances are that the public won't recognise the man behind the mask in movies from Quest Of Fire to his current hit Hellboy and in the TV series Beauty And The Beast (no prizes for guessing which one he played).

Perlman has made a living as a character actor and usually one hidden beneath latex and make-up. His latest role, as comic strip hero Hellboy, is no exception - except this time he's the star, although he has horns, a red complexion and a physique that any bodybuilder would die for.

Director Guillermo del Toro, who made Mimic and Blade II, championed him for the part - even though it took him seven years to persuade the money men to let the relatively unknown Perlman take the lead.

"It went through one studio for five years where he could have made the movie ten times over if he had just changed that one little idea as to who was going to play Hellboy, says Perlman. "The fact that he prevailed in this quest, which I always believed was absolutely undoable, is an act I've never witnessed before in my 30 years as a professional actor and probably never will again.

His first movie appearance was, typically, beneath a mountain of make-up as a caveman in Quest For Fire. And it's continued from that. He owns up to having a "rather extreme body of work" in which he's either the very good guy or the very bad guy and nothing inbetween.

"I do admit that there has been a proclivity of me being separated by an inch-and-a-half of latex from the camera. I also have come to realise that we all travel the path that's open to use. For me, the first film was Quest For Fire and I became known as the guy who, almost like Lon Chaney, transforms himself. So every time that exercise reappears I'm on the shortlist of people considered for those roles.

"Having said that, I enjoy mask work because it's very freeing. When there is this layer between me and the rest of the world, it somehow opens me up and allows me to be more expansive than I might be."

Hellboy, the monstrous result of an experiment that went wrong during the Second World War, finds himself fighting the undead Rasputin in between using his paranormal gifts for battling the evil forces threatening the world. He looks like a bad guy, but is actually a good guy with big horns and the attitude of a stroppy teenager.

The Hellboy look meant four hours in the make-up chair for Perlman before filming began each day. This is something he's used to, whether making movies or spending three years as the Beast on TV. Make-up expert Rick Baker spent a year between the project being approved and the start of filming to work on the transformation.

"He used every single day to either measure my forehead, or have my entire arm in a vat of Plaster of Paris, which 'didn't go well enough' and so I was back in there again the following day, completely covered in white goop, making impressions of me," he recalls.

"I really wanted to kill the guy - until I finally saw the first make-up test of Hellboy. I looked at it and went, "This is the most expressive make-up I've ever worn. It was an epiphany because it allowed me to play Hellboy as if I was wearing nothing at all. I mean I just basically played the idea of the guy and the feelings of the guy and was confident that it would read through.

"If you go back and watch the movie again, you'll see that you always know what Hellboy is thinking without me doing anything extra. So that annoying year has been long forgotten, even though I remembered it to tell you."

He has no problem being in the make-up chair for such lengths of time, he says, as he loves sitting around doing nothing. "I have great capuccino, we get cigarette breaks every 15 or 20 minutes, if I want 'em - and since I'm Hellboy, I'm the guy who decides when I'm gonna get up and stretch. There's some amazingly good music being played in the Hellboy trailer and I'm with a bunch of guys who are the trashiest human beings on earth, and the testosterone flies," he says.

Even the pressure of being the star for once instead of a supporting player didn't faze him because he loved the character so much. He couldn't wait to get on set to play Hellboy who was "such a cool dude, so deliciously devilish and so funny".

Perlman was not a comic book reader as a child, preferring the stories of Jack London or Charles Dickens. He even turned down del Toro's offer to buy him the Hellboy comics eight years ago because he didn't believe he'd ever get to play him on screen. "I didn't want to become emotionally involved with a character that I didn't think I'd be playing because I really didn't think I would. To this day, I still think, 'Did it really happen?'," he says.

*Hellboy (12A) opens in cinemas today (Thursday)

Published: 02/09/2004