Spare Parts Baddie Julian Richings On Going Big With Evil Characters

In Spare Parts, actor Julian Richings -- who also had a pretty demonic turn last month in Anything [...]

By Russ Burlingame

In Spare Parts, actor Julian Richings -- who also had a pretty demonic turn last month in Anything For Jackson -- plays The Emperor. In a world reminiscent of the Death Race or Mad Max franchises, The Emperor lords over a gladiatorial arena, where he pits travelers his people pick up on the road against one another, complete with makeshift bodily enhancements. It's a big, broad world and he's an incredibly eccentric character. It might not be the kind of character you instantly see in Richings, a slender and unassuming man who does a lot of non-verbal acting with his face and body.

He is chilling in the role, though, and takes a villain who could easily have been a caricature of himself into some interesting territory. The secret, he explained, is to let the script carry you to that place, and not worry about how it gels with anything you've done before.

"You have to be true to the script, and to the world that you're in," Richings told ComicBook. "Otherwise, you don't look you fit in that world, and it can seem like you're doing it for yourself, rather than the bigger story. So you jump in. So you don't try and deviate really from the script, you just try and inject it with as much honesty and spontaneity, I guess, as possible."

He offered a kind of amusing -- but certainly challenging -- example of how this kind of thing can influence a production. The script -- which is set largely outdoors -- wasn't written for winter, but that's when it was filmed. In Canada.

"So that's the thing that we all had to work within Spare Parts -- the fact that it was freezing because it was November in Northern Ontario, in a junkyard in the middle of nowhere," Richings recalled. "It was incredibly cold. So, in a situation like that, you either pretend it's not there and you play the archetype or you go, 'Okay, it's freezing. We have to just be true to the fact that we're all freezing, but I'm a guy that ignores it and continues on and is stoic about it, whereas the poor women who are the participants, the gladiators that are fighting in the arena are subject to the cold and they approach it in a very different way."

Of course, being stoic doesn't mean The Emperor doesn't feel things, just that he doesn't let them out.

"What's interesting, is to play the opposite," Richings explained. "So if you are at the top of the heap, to play it as if you're at the bottom of the heap, and to play the neurosis and the insecurity of somebody that actually is paranoid, rather than go 'Here I am. I'm the thing, and I'm overseeing everybody.' I try to play against what's expected, or at least allow a little bit of counterpoint, moments of vulnerability, or anything in the situation of a person that feels like they're at the bottom of the heap, maybe moments of power and empowerment."

You can get Spare Parts on DVD, Blu-ray, digital platforms, and streaming video on demand services now.

Trending Now: