Original subtitles

You always wanna do something bigger and better

that is unique.

Watch out!

Underneath every nice guy,

he wants to go and be creepy and be nasty.

They live in the moment. They have no consequences, no remorse.

They have no fear of what happens if they do something.

Wouldn't it be great to live like that?

The main attraction to monsters, creatures,

the dark side of evil is that

because it's fantasy, and because it doesn't exist,

the fact that you can physically put it in front of somebody, and bring

something to life that is not real,

as soon as the actor puts the personality

behind the look, it becomes real.

Belthazor, we meet at last.

| love playing bad guys. It's a great emotional release as well.

Because in real life | can't do those-- If | did that, I'd be in jail.

| have some of that in me.

| have that bad boy in me.

| just-- | don't really show it that often.

The whole purpose of every demon, in a sense, has to do with fear.

My character, Barbas, his way of making use of the fear was just to let

the fear do its own thing.

While the other demons were also using fear, they were trying to create

a new fear, and so those characters needed to be

physically frightening in order to create a fear.

- You're dead, witch. - A lot of times in the room

we don't know what they're gonna look like.

You write a monstrous demon with horns or a tattoo,

and that's where the creative process of

the makeup people and the special effects people come in.

You can give them kind of an idea and a general direction

of what you want but they're part of the team,

and their ideas come into play as well.

They would come up with the concept of what this demon was

and the personality traits. That would give me enough to kind of

give me a starting point to come up with the design.

And try to come up with something that was different every time.

A lot of times people really have no idea what to expect,

and they don't really know what it is you're going to show up with.

So the fun and the thrill of showing up either as the character

or as putting an actor in the makeup,

the response that you get from the crew and the actors

when they come up and they see this, it energizes people,

and it helps the actors get

to a point that they might not otherwise get to

if it was just a guy standing there, delivering the lines.

It made you feel really good because you

got an emotional response from people

just by putting rubber on someone's face.

"Upper level demon who likes to kill witches using an athame,

sometimes energy balls. His name... is Belthazor."

Belthazor was, | don't think one that we had

a particular vision of exactly what he was gonna look like

other than he had to be monstrous and completely different-looking

than Cole because the character is pretty much envisioned as

the Hulk side of Cole.

They wanted someone that was big and had a big stature

and a lot of presence. Just standing there meant power.

When they told me | was gonna play Belthazor, before | even got into

the wardrobe or anything, | had went over to Todd's makeup effects house.

Normally when they do makeup effects they always do drawings

or some kind of claymation-type images before they do that

to get studio approval.

There was two pieces on my ears and then one on my forehead,

and | think that was it. The rest of it's me.

And of course the eyes and the fingernails.

We'll finish this later.

There is one particular episode where | got kind of busted up a little bit.

It was an episode where they had a, like, alter ego of Belthazor,

so we had this big battle, and | got hurt

because there's a spot where he slams me on top of this table and he puts me

in this chokehold. Well, the dude was like really choking me.

And we kept going and as an actor, you never call "cut"

in the middle of a scene. You just don't do that. You wait for...

| was like, | was ready to go out. He was actually tearing my neck off.

It seemed like it. So it got a little crazy.

They wanted a character that had absolutely no facial features.

They wanted him just to be a blank slate.

They didn't want eyes, mouth, nose, anything.

And | was trying to figure out, how am | going to make that work

as a makeup, because you have to basically cover

all of the areas that you would breathe from.

| created a mask that | sculpted all myself,

and | created a little channel that went from my mouth underneath my chin

to right under here that you would breathe through.

Now, the only problem with that is that as soon as you start breathing heavily,

it would suck the mask onto your face,

and you were no longer able to breathe.

Really what it came down to was that | just had to hold my breath.

Get calmed down, and they'd say, "Are you ready to go?"

"I'm ready to go. Here we go."

"And action.” Do my stuff, and then

calm down again and get my breath back.

So all they had to do was make sure that | didn't pass out or die.

It was definitely one of the more challenging characters to play

simply because of the breathing aspect of it.

But the design of it, to have no features and be completely skin

all the way down... It was just a cool look

that it was worth it to put myself in that situation to make it look that way.

We did not know what the Source was gonna look like.

It was a big, dramatic moment.

| remember the day in the room where Brad's like

"Well, maybe his hood falls down and we see his face and it's

horribly disfigured." And you see what the makeup people came up with,

and in that particular case, they did a great job of rendering some guy

who was scary enough, but also had a bit of humanity underneath

that made him a formidable enemy.

There was an episode called "The Power of Three Blonds" where

there were supposed to be two gremlins.

They were supposed to be brother gremlins and

what they did was they shot me against a green screen

and shrunk me down to about this big in the episode.

I think the gremlins were only going to be maybe six inches or a foot tall.

Once we started shooting the background plates,

we then needed to shoot Todd in the appropriate way

with the right lens and from the right angles,

so that when we shrunk his image down, it would fit within the frame,

and it would make it feel like he really was that size, in that shot.

| had to play both gremlins and they relatively looked the same,

but they would change the lenses that | was wearing

from black lenses to yellow, cat-eye-looking lenses,

and then they would change out the wardrobe.

And at one point in time, they had me hanging from a harness

to make it look like | was pushing a box over, and | was

in between two boxes

so they had me on a harness with two green-screen boxes,

got the motion and then, when they shrunk me down, they took

the real boxes and put them in there and made it look like | was

knocking them over.

Watch out!

Any time you're working with wires and stuff,

you're always having the issues of allowing the actor to still move

to be able to twist and turn or whatever he's gonna do,

and not pinch, not rub against-- And it's tough.

They had me walking on a treadmill to make it look like

| was walking across this set,

and then | had to, while the treadmill was going, | had to

jump in the air and actually flip around to the other side and walk backwards.

| wasn't quite sure if | could do it, but we did it and got it on the first take.

That was actually a lot of fun. As tough as that day was,

| would do it again and again.

Probably my favourite episode that | got to play, there was a character called

The Aggressor, and it was going to be a superhero gone bad.

And it was the only character | ever played where you could see my face.

It was so much fun because every time | showed up,

| just destroyed everything.

| just started trashing the house, the rooms, throwing people around

and having a lot of fun.

Who doesn't wanna play an evil superhero?

There's a couple other characters we did,

a couple ghost characters. There was one girl that came in and | just

did a gaunty makeup on her.

It was very subtle, but because it was so subtle in the way they shot her

and they made her transparent again,

that it was really creepy because it wasn't over-the-top.

It was really kind of real and what you would expect

if you actually saw a ghost.

So sometimes the subtler stuff is actually as impacting

as the bigger stuff, depending on what the character is

and where you take it.

Well, that really stings.

The idea was that half of him was the demon, and the other half

- was his other human self. - Hot side.

Throughout the show we had one lens in one eye too,

so it was really splitting his character down the middle.

They really wanted him to kind of have a lizardy guy kind of a face.

So when we created the appliance, we gave him a kind of lizard,

slit-eye look to go with the green face that he wore.

And then it made it so that it looked like a diseasing demon

so that the flesh on this side would blend in and crawl into that side.

That art form of taking an idea that's written on the page,

creating a demon image, giving me a makeup that

with the modeling of the green coming down to the reptilian face

and then with the eye shows the disparity

and the inner conflict of the character.

| think demons are the side of people that they repress,

because you just can't be walking around slapping people

in the face with an axe just because you're angry.

And it gives a visual tag to the dark side of humanity.

So for his character, because he was torn between the demon side

and the human side, that's why having

the half face this way and the real face this way lent itself

to that character. | think the fascination, too, is that

when you get into a fantasy world and you're creating a look

of something that doesn't truly exist, there are certain iconic things

that people will naturally just react to.

So to be able to create a look and then have an actor like Zach

bring life to a visual,

it just brings the whole package together

and it really sells the overall character.

In that case, I guess I'll just have to Kill...

...her.

Didn't see that coming, did you?

| was impressed so many times

by so many of the ways the demons rendered themselves,

whether it was an actor, | mean Billy Drago was amazing.

David Carradine was great.

I'd be amazed by what Todd Tucker could do.

He'd give a demon two heads and it would work.

So there wasn't one moment where | went "that's amazing."

It was a never-ending series of moments,

whether it was the actors, whether it was the casting,

whether it was the makeup, whether it was the visual effects,

it was constantly a concern of mine, but we always swung for the fences,

and | think that's a reason the show remained fresh

over the course of the years

because we kept pushing

and everybody behind the scenes kept coming through.