Cast A Giant Shadix
Accomplished actor Glenn Shadix’s roles in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys may not have been omnipotent, but they were certainly larger than life. Abbie Bernstein braves an audience with the father of all monsters and discovers some of the secrets which went into teaming him up with the hero of the hour.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 20
Offering a guest a cup of coffee in his Los Angeles home, Glenn Shadix acts the perfect Southern American gentleman. Despite being physically imposing, he hardly appears the type to father a brood of monsters or dine on luckless thieves. But in the Hercules episodes Cast a Giant Shadow and Monster Child in the Promised Land, Shadix did just that.
The actor played the part of the good-hearted giant Typhon, husband to Echidna, the mother of all monsters, in both episodes, and later returned to Hercules to play Typhon's grouchy brother, Typhoon, in Beanstalks and Bad Eggs. "I'm not the first person you'd think of to play this kindly giant character,” the actor admits with a laugh. “I mean, people tend to see me as a little more arch.”
In fact, it was Shadix's role as a fussy hotel guest in the 1996 film Dunston Checks In that led to his towering appearances on Hercules. “John Kretchmer, assistant director on [Dunston], was set to direct for Hercules,” Shadix recalls. “He started talking to me about doing something in New Zealand with him. At the time I thought, 'Hmmm ...'. This was before it was a hit, so I was thinking, ‘This looks a little like it might be a cheesy situation.’”
Shadix was persuaded to reconsider taking a part in the show by a friend who was a Hercules fan. “He said to me, 'You have to do it!' Plus I wanted to go to New Zealand!”
The character of Typhon wasn't created with Shadix in mind, which meant that the character had to undergo a few changes once the actor was signed. “They had the part,” Shadix explains, "they had the giant, and then they came to John [Kretchmer], and John came to me. He had to sell me to the producers, and then we worked on the piece together to shape it more towards me. We both wrote a lot on all three episodes, and added a lot of the humour.
“We changed little things here and there in the first one, but by the last episode we were almost rewriting the scripts,” Shadix reveals. “We'd usually write it here in Hollywood and then take it to the producers, and at the read through [of the script], people would make a Iot of suggestions.
“We tried to add a lot more joy to the character of Typhon. For example, he wasn't a dancer in the original script, but we made him want to dance, which was fun.” As an example Shadix cites his final episode, the comic Beanstalks and Bad Eggs. “That had the tango with Bruce Campbell,” he points out. “I put a dance in Monster Child in the Promised Land that was pretty wild, too.”
Shadix says that there were significant differences between the two giants he played. “Typhon, the friendlier of the two brothers, wa actually a bit taller than Typhoon,” he explains.
“Typhoon had a Napoleon complex, because he was only 15 feet tall, as opposed to the 18 feet of Typhon! I didn’t want to play Typhon as too thick, like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. I wanted him to be a little on the slow side, but a kindly man. When he did anything bad or hurt anybody, he was really upset and ashamed. He really wanted to work with people, not to step on them.”
Ever since his childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, Shadix has always wanted to fill the screen, although not in quite the literal terms that he does in Hercules. “My mother remarried when I was five and I was told that my name was going to be changed because my stepfather was adopting me, and I was curious as to whether the name change would affect my future career. I had to think, ‘Would The Glenn Shadix Show be good for a television show?’” he laughs. “From the start, I wanted to be an actor.”
Shadix’s first professional gig was a stage production of Man of La Mancha in Atlanta, Georgia.
New York and then Hollywood followed. Initially, aside from the theatre, Shadix just worked in videos that he wrote himself, although he did have some minor movie roles. “I had one line in The Postman Always Rings Twice,” he recalls. “I asked Jessica Lange, ‘What about my chicken sandwich?’ with my back to the camera!”
Shadix had an unlucky break while doing some extra work on Skatetown, USA - a stunt man mistakenly jumped on him. “I popped my right ankle,” he reports ruefully.
But the actor’s luck was about to change. Filmmaker Tim Burton saw Shadix playing a singularly unlikely character, Gertrude Stein, in a Los Angeles theatrical production of Dr Faustus Lights the Lights, and cast Shadix as Catherine O’Hara’s spooked interior decorator friend in Beetlejuice. Other film and television work followed, much of it in fantasy projects, including a minister in Heathers, a friend to giant bugs in Meet the Applegates, Nigel Hawthorne’s eunuch assistant in Demolition Man, and the voice of the Halloweentown mayor in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Shadix feels that working in the fantasy genre offers actors some unique opportunities. “It gives you a chance to go to extremes with your character,” he explains, “to develop more eccentric characters. They’re a little more outlandish. So it’s a lot of fun.”
Sometimes, however, horror can be hazardous. Shadix had another on-set accident, this one potentially fatal, when he played an ill-fated high school teacher in Sleepwalkers, Stephen King’s first original screenplay. “I played someone who rubbed a supernatural cat monster who was posing as one of my students the wrong way, and ended up with my throat slashed,” Shadix relates. “In a scene that wound up on the cutting room floor, I was strung up 30 feet high in a tree, with rubber barbed wire around me. I was in a complete body harness that was supposed to be hooked up to a cable, but the day-jobber who was doing the [rigging] didn’t have me hooked securely. The next thing I know, I’m falling through the air! Some of the crewmembers literally threw a ladder at the tree, which luckily broke my fall, and I slid down it.”
Happily, the Hercules set posed no such perils, although Shadix was called upon to perform several hijinks. “I had a lot of pratfalls and a lot of stunts, which were actually fun to do,” he recalls. “It feels like on every shoot I do, people love it when horrible things befall my characters! I always seem to be running into this, running into that, falling down stairs...”
Special effects on a tight budget call for creativity from the production team and hard work from the actors. In Hercules, Shadix was made to loom over Kevin Sorbo’s Herc via “forced perspective” - having the actors in frame together but positioning them in such a way that it looks as though one is much nearer and smaller than is really the case. Shadix says he found the experience educational. “I learned more about eye-lines and how to work with them.”
An eye-line, Shadix explains, is where the actor’s gaze is focused, whether or not the other actor he’s talking to is physically there. “Eyelines can be critical for a performance, in terms of how you, the actor, are in control of them and how to not think about them. You have to establish for the camera where the other actor is through the direction of your gaze. So sometimes you're playing these extremely dramatic scenes to little pieces of tape on the wall, or you have to have three little pieces of tape on the wall if the person you’re talking to is moving around. So often your eye-line has to sell it.
“In a situation like this, you can’t actually look at who you’re talking to,” Shadix continues. “If they’re supposed to be very small, the smallness comes from the fact that they’re 30 feet away from you, but you have to pretend that you’re looking right down at them. With forced perspective, I would be up on a raised platform. The crew would match the surface of the platform with the ground 25 feet beyond or further - I don’t know exactly what the dimensions were, but Kevin Sorbo would be way over there looking up, and I would be way, way in the foreground, looking at tape marks. I could barely hear him, but I had to judge where to look, especially when he moved around, because my looking at him sold the forced perspective.”
In Monster Child in the Promised Land, some perspective effects were achieved by changing the size of the monsters. “We had more than one model for my baby,” Shadix recalls. “When I actually held it, it would be one size, and then it had to be a different size in relation to me than it was with the regular-sized people.”
The Hercules production team also had a pragmatic way of making it look as if the giant was getting stroppy and knocking people down. “They would shoot my hand coming down and then they would cut to someone tumbling or something like that,” Shadix explains. “It was all pretty run-of-the- mill Hollywood trickery.”
However, as Shadix is quick to add, there was nothing run-of-the-mill about the star of Hercules. “When you guest star on a television show, you never know what somebody's going to be like,” he says, “but Kevin was universally loved by the cast and crew. He’s a gentle, wonderful man. We became friends and we still keep in touch.
“I think the atmosphere on the set of Hercules really had a lot to do with the personality and stamina of Kevin Sorbo - not just because he was very appealing, but his cooperative, collaborative way of working with everybody from top to bottom. I learned a lot from working with him, particularly about really pushing yourself to the limit, because he would get up at four o'clock, go to the gym and come in and do a 14-hour day, and at the time he was also working with a swordsman between setups for Krull. When you’re carrying a whole show, you pretty much have to be a superhuman in order to be a success.”
While in New Zealand, Shadix also got to see another side of Hercules star Michael Hurst beyond his character of lolaus. “I adore Michael and his wife. He directed a production of [Lord of the Rings filmmaker] Peter Jackson’s Deadalive on stage in Auckland,” Shadix says, referring to a live theatrical production of the gory horror film. “They had plastic things for the audience to put on when it got really, really bloody. It was pretty amazing.”
Three trips to the Hercules sets over a period of several years allowed Shadix to get a glimpse of the development of international television production in New Zealand. “When we first shot Hercules, they were desperately training new people,” he recalls. “It was such a boom in the film business down there that every single job on the set was being apprenticed so that they could build more crews. They had an incredible crew down there. When I first came on, they didn’t have any real studio at all, they just had little offices down by the harbour. They’ve now built these state-of-the-art studios.
“So it was great to witness what an incredible operation it became by being there near the beginning of the series and then at the end of the series, and to see how the community in New Zealand responded to the success of the show, how they built the facilities for both Xena and Herc and had a huge work force by the time Hercules ended.”
New Zealand itself holds a special place in Shadix’s heart. “The first time I went, I toured the whole country,” he reminisces. “I went down to the south island in a little crop plane, over what they call the Southern Alps. I went down to the rain forest. I went to Queenstown, where the water goes the other way down the drain - it actually does!
“In a way, New Zealand has a lot in common with the American South, because it’s an English- settled agrarian place. On my second trip down there, I hadn’t been on a horse since I was a kid, and the casting director asked if I wanted to go on a little trail ride. It turned into a ride through a rain forest, fording a river, going over these big black volcanic dunes and racing down towards the Tasmanian Sea. If I hadn’t known how to ride, I’d’ve been killed,” he laughs, “but it was so beautiful. Where they filmed the show is, as far as I'm concerned, the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.”
Shadix’s upcoming projects include an independent film called Shut Up, Little Man, voiceover work on the animated Jackie Chan Adventures, and a role as a civilized orangutan in the new Planet of the Apes film, reuniting him with director Tim Burton.
He may have plenty of other projects behind and ahead of him, but Shadix admits that he will always look back with great fondness on his role in the Ancient World. “My working on Hercules was an absolute joy from beginning to end,” he affirms.