Freak Show
Jeremy Roberts has portrayed all manner of villains, freaks and generally unpopular characters in genre television and films. The actor peels off his latest latex mask to talk to Joe Nazzaro about playing baddies in the Xenaverse and beyond.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 16
When Jeremy Roberts set out to become an actor, it's probably safe to assume that he didn't plan to spend most of his career playing villains. But that's certainly the way it worked out.
“It doesn't bug me,” claims Roberts. “Somebody once said to me, ‘If you're not typecast, you're not cast.’ If they can't find a place for you, then you won't fit anywhere. So I said ‘Fine, I can be a bad guy, and if I’m good enough, someday they’ll see me as the person to play the dad or a good person.’ But those aren’t the most fun parts. Usually the most fun roles are the people who go around killing everybody.
“So my agent just started sending me out to audition for bad guy parts, and I didn't mind because I kept getting the parts and they were interesting. The only problem is that after about 125-150 guest spots, it’s hard to find the difference between one serial killer or mythological freak and the next. Sometimes you want to play a nice guy, but it doesn’t bother me. This is just the way I look, and it lends itself to being on the shadier side of personalities.”
Roberts has appeared in just about every genre series of recent years, from Xena to The X-Files. His CV includes guest spots on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager and of course the Hercules: The Legendary Journeys/Xena: Warrior Princess family, where he’s played no less than four different characters over the past several years. “I did the first character, and of course you always hope to get called back, and I was very lucky. They just kept calling me back and saying, ‘Do you want to do this freak and this geek?’
Ironically, Roberts hadn't originally planned to be an actor, much less corner the market on villainous roles. His show business aspirations were pretty much extinguished during his first school production, when he played a gravedigger and promptly fell into one of the graves during a performance. That should have been the end of it, but years later a friend asked him to step in at the last minute to replace an actor in her play who had fallen ill.
“I said okay one night and that was it!” he recalls. “So I did it, and it was a cathartic experience Everyone just roared with laughter and I fell in love with being on stage. So I did a few more plays and then decided that maybe I'd better go to school. I did two years at our community college, and then applied to ACT [the American Conservatory Theater] in San Francisco and got accepted, and my career steamrolled from there. I did summer reps and theatre, and the next step was Hollywood, where I grew up. I got an agent immediately from a showcase I did and I’ve been working regularly ever since.”
Among the film credits that Roberts quickly piled up are The Marrying Man, National Lampoon Christmas Vacation, The Mask, Sister Act, Money Train, The Thirteenth Floor and, most recently, The Mexican, in which he starred alongside Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts.
On television, Roberts has made dozens of episodic appearances, but it’s his genre work that has proven to be the most enjoyable. With Xena: Warrior Princess, for example, he first appeared as the assassin Thersites in A Fistful of Dinars. And the actor enjoyed working with Director Josh Becker so much on that episode that the two teamed up again for Becker’s 1997 feature Running Time.
“Josh is a blast,” Roberts enthuses. “You get to work with a million different directors with different personalities in this profession, who all react to you in different ways. But Josh is a regular guy, and I like that. He's got a monster knowledge of the business - genre television and all kinds of films. He’d say to me, ‘I can remember the exact words that Dustin Hoffman said in Little Big Man,' and then he’d come up with all the dialogue.”
The actor soon returned to Auckland to work with Renaissance Pictures, this time for the Hercules season three opener Mercenary. Directed by the show’s series regular Michael Hurst, the episode was virtually a two-hander for Roberts and Kevin Sorbo. “After I'd auditioned for A Fistful of Dinars, they just called and said, ‘Do you want to do this one?’
“I loved Mercenary. There were a few science fiction special effects with those sandworms, but Kevin said it was actually one of his favourite episodes because he was more of an actor in it. It was just about a couple of guys sitting on a rock talking and trying not to get eaten by the sandworms. It's one of the shows I have in my portfolio because it's such a good one.”
Next up on Xena was Paradise Found, in which Xena and Gabrielle stumble upon an idyllic Eden-like place where Gabrielle falls under the spell of the mysterious but powerful spiritual leader Aiden (Roberts), who is not all he appears to be. “That one allowed me to be a nicer person,” Roberts recalls of Paradise Found. “I’m a family guy, so I normally only get to take out my aggressions by killing people on television! I am spiritual and I do believe in meditation, so I was able to get into that character. But there was still that dark side to him. Rob [Tapert] directed that one, and he was so easy to work with. I’ve been very lucky with my directors.”
Roberts made one last appearance in Hercules' final season, playing the Satanic Xerxes in Be Deviled. This time, he not only worked with Sorbo, but also Sorbo's real-life wife Sam, who was reprising her role as Serena, or so it appeared. “She was supposed to be a minion of Satan,” Roberts explains, “but I didn't agree that his wife should be the evil one because she’s just too pretty! I'm not putting her down, but she didn't want to get into any facial things and ugly herself up; she didn’t even want lenses.
“I didn’t have a problem uglying myself up because I wasn’t ever pretty," Roberts laughs. “But I think there should have been something that showed us that Serena was evil, because it’s hard to play that without a little help. I had horns and wings, so that was a great help. I could play that kind of character until I’m 70 - actually, I might have to!”
While Roberts enjoyed playing Xerxes complete with extensive prosthetic make-up, it wasn't always that way. The actor still remembers his first big brush with prosthetics when he was cast as a Jem’Hadar warrior in an early episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, an experience he admits wasn't very enjoyable. “We were totally covered from head to foot in this polyurethane stuff that surfers use to keep warm,” he remembers, "and I got sick on the second day. The mouth hole was only about half an inch wide, so it wasn't pleasant.
“They said, ‘We can't put him on stage; what do we do?’ and I pointed to a guy who had been putting on this make-up and all these suits for years as an extra, and said. 'Give him the lines. I haven’t said anything yet.' So he finished what I'd started and got his Screen Actor's Guild card.
“I've now done several of these full head things, and it gets a little scary; not necessarily when they're putting them on, but when they’re making the pieces in the beginning. They cover you in this plastic goop and give you a straw to breathe through, and then say, ‘Trust me!’ I’d prefer not to do it, but I wouldn't want to miss out on the opportunity to be Lon Chaney and play all these different characters and faces.”
Fortunately, the actor's other Star Trek experience was much more rewarding. The role was as one of Captain Sulu’s crew members in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a part which was later reprised in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. “I was thrilled,” he says of being cast in the film. “I grew up with Star Trek, so the day that Spock walked on set for the first time, my jaw dropped. When he came on with those ears and that make-up, there were like 55 crew members all watching and saying ‘There’s Spock!’ I just wish they didn’t have the security there, because every time I walked off the set, I had to take off the red jacket and communicator, and they took away my little hand-held computer device!”
With his work on The Mexican recently finished, Roberts has returned to genre television once again, reprising the role of a lactose-intolerant French terrorist in the second season of the popular US science fiction series The Invisible Man. “It is kind of tongue-in-cheek,” he admits of the character. “You can’t have somebody popping Rolaids or Tums and then shooting someone and saying, ‘Pardone’.”
And while Jeremy Roberts wouldn't mind playing some different characters from time to time, the prospect of playing bad guys for the next several years doesn't disturb him too much. “It’s usually the nasty guys who are the sweetest little bears,” he declares.
“People who live on my block can’t believe I played this or that racist scumbag or murderer, and my mom is always calling from Alabama and saying, ‘Well, I saw you, but gosh, you were so disgusting and awful that I question how I raised you!’
“So I say, ‘Well, it’s your fault. Mom!’”