Luke Goss is Hellboy II's Prince Nuada

[wayshway]

Actor Luke Goss has established himself well in the world of genre films, after playing the mutant vampire Jared Nomak in Guillermo del Toro's Blade II over five years ago and appearing in a series of independent horror films since then. He continues his run of comic book movies by reteaming with Del Toro to play the role of Prince Nuada, the main antagonist in Hellboy II: The Golden Army, the prince of the elves who comes to the surface in order to recover one third of a crown that will bring back the Golden Army, something that puts him into conflict with Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. Superhero Hype! sat down with the actor at a fancy restaurant in Budapest where we spoke to Goss and the Prince's twin sister and better half Princess Nuala AKA Anna Walton. (You can read our interview with her here.)

Superhero Hype!: You worked with Guillermo before. Did he come to you directly for this role?
Luke Goss: He did actually. It was one of those "I wish" situations and it bizarrely happened. I didn't personally get a call, my management did… from Jeremy in London, the casting guy, who said, "Look, we have a script for Luke from Guillermo, the 'Hellboy' script, and he wants to know what Luke thinks of this script." Which is ridiculous because… "I don't like it Guillermo, I'm sorry." (laughter) Give me a break. So I read it and we had some back and forths and then I hadn't heard from Guillermo for maybe three months, four months, maybe more even, then I was in my car in L.A., expecting to get a phone call telling me that he was going to call me at some point. He calls me, and goes "Hey!" and I'm like "I know who this is", and he's like, "Motherf*cker!" So that was his first piece of grammar I'd heard from him in three months. I was like, "Fantastic!" and he said, "I'm glad you responded to it." I said, "I didn't respond to it. I was just like a kid in the candy store, like I was watching the Academy Awards crossing my fingers for you and you're sending me a script." It wasn't about responding to it, it was about being like a kid and dying to have the opportunity to work with him again.

SHH!: When you got the script, did you know that the Elf Prince was the role that he was looking for you to play, or did he just send it and say, "Just tell me what you think"?
Goss: I knew it was the Elf Prince, I knew it was the nemesis. I knew that for sure.

SHH!: Can you give us some background on your character?
Goss: Yeah, this is one I have to think about without spoiling the plot. His father is the king of the Unseen Realm, as much as he's the Elf King, he's still the king of the Unseen Realm, and as his son and heir, I'm potentially the future king of that realm. My father has some ideas that I don't particularly believe in, and the great thing about Guillermo's idea of a good guy/bad guy is that I think you get a lot of that stuff for free, you get a lot of the situation takes care of who's the good guy and who's the bad guy. When you got a great actor like Ron Perlman playing Hellboy, then they already know what's going on, they know who the good guy is. You got a father-son issue here again--without going into detail--that just gives it a great three-dimension to the story. Like everything Guillermo does, he's not afraid to bring in sentiment and pain and family and issues to a genre media. I love it because all the purists out there that kind of poo-poo the genre movies have to get over it, because Guillermo is directing the movie, which is great, and I'm lucky to be a part of it.

SHH!: Did you see the original "Hellboy" when it came out or did you go back and watch it again after you got this role?
Goss: Yeah, I was doing a movie with Samuel Jackson and Eugene Levy in Canada and it came out, and I was up there with my wife, and we're like two Del Toro groupies. My other manager was up there at the time, and we said, "Let's go and see the movie" and he went and had cocoa and my wife and I just managed to catch the midnight showing in Toronto the day it came out, just because everything he does… he's been responsible for a l