As Sinestro in “Green Lantern,” Mark Strong gets to hide behind purple make-up and prosthetics but while he say’s that didn’t bother him, they did pose a challenge for him.
“You have to rethink the way you use your face. We take for granted the fact that you communicate with people by your eyes, your eyebrows, your brow, how you are using your face,” he said. “Suddenly when you have a prosthetic, that changes, because what you are doing underneath the prosthetic is not necessarily what’s registering out there. So you have to learn different ways of communicating, which I’ve had to do with the way he tilts his head, the way he catches the light. It’s been fascinating.”
The theater trained actor approached working with a green screen, as he would acting in a play. “I don’t know if it gives me an advantage, but it doesn’t faze me. If you grow up doing ten or fifteen years of theatre, you know it’s not real, you know you’re in a room, you can see the front row of the audience, you can see the lights, you know the minute you walk off stage there’s a props table where you get your gear. You walk on pretending you’ve just been somewhere else, it’s not real it’s about imagination, and the fact that people can go in a room and switch the lights off and watch another bunch of people pretending to be other people and be transported, in terms of a story, is fascinating to me and having experienced it, being in a blue box pretending to be an alien, it’s the same thing.”
Strong admits to a momentary hesitation about tackling yet another comic book character, but the story and the role won him over. “I definitely thought about it, because how often can you play something that shares its DNA with other characters before it either becomes uninteresting to me and to an audience, or you hit a dead end with variation of what one could introduce to the character. But I suppose if you were playing a leading man you have the same problem; Harrison Ford is essentially the same in every movie he’s in, but it doesn’t cause us any problems because it’s the story and the place of the character within the narrative of that story that’s important. And if the story and the film are successful and work, you won’t be considering that and I don’t consider that. I take everything on its own merits – so I considered it, but it doesn’t bother me at all.”
via wsj.com
