Robert Patrick plays Auggie Smith AKA White Dragon AKA Peacemaker’s father on Peacemaker, and his character is a very bad man. In fact, writer and director James Gunn recently talked about why it was “very hard” to write such a horrible character. Of course, this isn’t Patrick’s first time playing a nasty villain. The actor’s most famous role was playing the T-100 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. During a recent interview with Slash Film, Partick talked about working with Gunn on Peacemaker and comapred the director to T2 helmer, James Cameron.
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“Well, I knew that James Cameron was a brilliant man,” Patrick said of his time working on T2. “I think James Gun is a brilliant man, and I think James Cameron is a brilliant man. I think they’re in that class with the Elon Musks of the world in their prospective fields and where they lend their talents – I think they’re groundbreaking artists.”
He added, “I think that I am such a luddite, and I have a hard time with an iPhone, a computer and all this kind of stuff – God bless my wife, if she wasn’t able to help me out with all the stuff that I do, I don’t think I’d be able to do it – but as far as the effects and everything, when I read Terminator 2, I read that script, it took me five hours to read it. I couldn’t comprehend what the f*ck was going on. I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, what? What the f*ck?’”
During the interview, Patrick also explained why playing terrible characters can be easier.
“Yeah, I don’t know, but it’s true. Character acting and finding a character is what we do, and sometimes if you don’t play a character that’s so clearly defined as this, and you have to find shade, it’s a little harder to find nuance and color that you want to give the character – the tone as it were. My good friend, Hal Holbrook, God rest his soul, said he had a harder time playing closer to himself, being himself, than playing Mark Twain because Mark Twain is the character that he embodied and played in his one-night shows and whatnot. He could hide behind the makeup and all this kind of stuff, and that’s the truth. When you’re playing something a little closer to you, it is harder. When you’re playing something farther away from you, thank God in my case a racist, xenophobe, misogynist, that’s about as far removed from me as you can get, and so it’s easier to grab. I know that doesn’t logically make sense, [but] it’s the reality.”
The finale of Peacemaker drops on HBO Max on Thursday.
