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He's played pretty much every kind of
role under the sun, but Lance Henriksen still has a special place in
his heart for Frank Black...
In his extensive career spanning over 30 years, Lance Henriksen must
have played every type of character under the sun. While still most
famous among genre fans for his role as Bishop in the Alien
movies, many will also know him from his stint as FBI profiler Frank
Black in Millennium. After hanging on a knife edge at the end
of each season, Millennium finally shut up shop after three
seasons. Does the actor wish it had carried on past this point? "It
would have been nice, but believe me, everything worked out for the
best," he considers. "I'm back to films now, there's no looking back
and feeling sad about anything, it's just the way it is. I never
regret anything like that, because there are so many elements of it
that are out of my hands.
"I was in a truck heading down [with some crew members] from Vancouver
to LA to jump on a plane, and when [the powers that be] said it was
cancelled, we cheered. We were laughing and cheering and they were
going, 'Are you laughing and cheering?' and we said, 'Yeah!' They
said, 'Well, we're kind of sad,' and I said, 'Yeah, but that's the way
it goes, you know? I mean, what are we supposed to do?' Honest
emotions. We were exhausted, man, we were totally wiped out!
"Here's the thing," Henriksen considers, when asked if Millennium's
seasonal format alterations became problematic. "Even marriages don't
work if the people involved in it don't grow together. How can they
expect a corporate thing like a television show to work if there's no
growth? You can't just keep plodding along; if that happens, you're
wasting your life. And I think it was some of the best television I've
ever seen, some of those shows that we did on Millennium. I'm
not just wagging my own tail, I honestly believe that. Some of those
shows were good writing and were shot really well and the actors that
came to visit on those shows, some of them were incredible and it went
very well. That's all you can ask for. I just think one of the reasons
it went out was because it didn't grow. Change is not necessarily
growth."
In many ways it was up to Henriksen to keep viewers tuning in, with
Frank Black being pretty much the only unchanging element of the
ongoing story. Unfortunately, it was something of a case of one step
forward and two steps back.
"Yeah, from one show to the next you didn't know who was your enemy
and who was your friend. Yet you couldn't express it. It wasn't like
they'd let Frank Black sit down and say, 'You know, I feel like I'm
going really insane, one day you're my friend, the next day I wanna
kill you.' The humour wasn't allowed, and neither were the street
smarts. I really am gonna look forward to doing a show where there's
humour, even in a dramatic thing. We know that five minutes after you
almost go off the road in a car and you're almost killed, you're
laughing. You have to, you have to let it out, and that's the thing
that was missing. I don't care how much of a dirge anybody thinks
sells, it doesn't, not as well."
When Millennium finally bit the dust, Chris Carter offered
Frank Black and Henriksen the chance to come back for an episode of
The X-Files, the Season Seven episode cunningly entitled
"Millennium." Curiously, the story related the news that the
Millennium Group were all being killed, only to be reanimated as
zombies, leading Mulder to enlist Frank's consulting help on the case.
Fans of the original, however, were wondering how long this had been
the Millennium Group's ultimate, rather ridiculous, plan and what had
gone wrong. They weren't alone, agrees a chuckling Henriksen.
"I gotta tell you, man, the way I got pitched this by Chris Carter,
the reason I went on The X-Files, he said to me, 'This is gonna
be closure for Millennium,' and I went, 'Oh God, great, Chris,
I can't wait to read the script.' So the day I got to the set to do
the show, I get the script and I'm facing zombies. Now what has that
got to do with the closing of Millennium? Absolutely nothing!
And I thought, 'That's closure for Millennium, all right. Yeah,
right.'
"I thought, 'They're gonna give dignity to Millennium and here
comes a show on The X-Files to give it dignity and it became
zombies! I went, 'Oh shit, I'm going down in flames!'" He bursts out
laughing again. "I have to laugh about it, man. But you get sold the
bill of goods. If somebody says to you, 'This is a tribute to
something', you're gonna want to believe it, and so you go, 'Oh good,
okay.' And then when you get there and it's in a taste and style that
you're not interested in, it's pretty funny. Now it's hysterical!" he
chuckles again.
But would he ever return to The X-Files for another try? "They
wouldn't want me on there!" he laughs, continuing, "Listen, I'm a
little bit like a boxer. You put the opponent up in front of me and
I'll deal with it, you know what I mean? And I don't mean The
X-Files is the opponent in a negative way, I mean it's a sport.
What we do, acting, is a combination of a love affair and a sport. I'd
try anything and I'll go for it. I'm not afraid of anything.
"I've never tried to have a career where I've calculated [everything].
It's been more like a farm where you get up in the morning and you
step out and you smell the air and you get out there and you try to
grow something. I hear they're gonna do an X-Files movie and I
think they'd be insane not to bring Frank Black into it. Without
zombies," he laughs. "Bring him into the mix, man. He's a force to be
reckoned with, or at least he's game, he's adventurous. He's not just
sitting in an office somewhere. He can handle anything."
While he's waiting for this offer, though,
Henriksen has a nice little sideline going on: he makes and sells his
own pottery, each piece hand-crafted. "Everybody needs labour," he
begins, keen to discuss his work. "You do, I do, everyone does.
There's rest in labour, there's pride in it. You've gotta be able to
do something, even if it's just digging in a garden, but you gotta do
it every day when you're not doing the thing that makes you a living.
Now, acting is certainly an art form, but pottery for me is spiritual.
"I make pottery, dinnerware and stuff, that people can eat off and
use. It's not just artsy stuff like gargoyles, but when you put food
on my pottery, it looks really beautiful, it makes you feel like this
is an occasion, and that's what I work for. I love doing it. We've put
up a website this year for the first time and it's paying off because
it's getting exposure. I don't like galleries. I think galleries are
just extortionist. I don't wanna go that route.
"I took a 1973 military truck and restored it completely," explains
the actor when asked how he's been getting his work out to the public.
It's not the kind of truck you'd miss either, as the name of the
pottery, 'Screaming Red Ass', is on the side. "What [that] means,"
explains Henriksen, "is during the Second World War there was an
American flying fortress; they painted a jackass on the nose of their
airplane and put 'Screaming Red Ass' [on it]. Pottery just takes
itself so seriously, I like to be more blasphemous about it. I don't
wanna be considered one of the old ladies that are making teacups. And
that truck, I sell pottery right off the back of it; I get to meet
people and talk to them about what they like."
Of course, making pottery is a useful skill to have when you're an
actor and not always employed. "It's not only that," Henriksen
reveals, "But I will not sit around and wait for somebody else's call
to live. That's a big mistake. If I've got a movie to do and I have a
month to get ready for it, I do it organically. So it's very important
for me to have a good sense of time, time being used well and time
just lived. I'm not waiting to live any more of my life."
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