The late, great Hunter S. Thompson once said, “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
This statement clearly applies to the movie business as well, and in both cases, it’s absolutely true. Yet, there are times when Hollywood, as greedy, shallow and narcissistic as it is, can restore your faith in humanity.
I was cruising around the ‘Net when I saw a picture of Hellboy hanging out with a small kid, and as it turns out Ron Perlman went back into Hellboy make-up for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. As the Hollywood Reporter tells us, it was a six year-old child named Zachary who is undergoing leukemia treatment, and it was his wish to meet Hellboy.
On Facebook, Perlman said he “loved the idea,” and spent four hours in make-up becoming Hellboy again. Young Zachary got made up as Hellboy as well, looking absolutely adorable in the Hellboy design, sporting a smile a mile wide.
And as the Reporter also mentions, this isn’t the first time Spectral Motion, the FX house that designed Hellboy’s make-up, has worked with Make-A-Wish. Within a three week period, they not only brought Hellboy back for young Zachary, they also brought in another kid named Caleb, to look at some of the studio’s cool animatronics designs from X-Men and Fantastic Four.
Again, it is increasingly rare that Hollywood is actually capable of making audiences feel good about humanity and the industry in general, but this story put a smile on my face a mile wide as well, and has given me even more respect for Ron Perlman.
He’s played plenty of great roles in his career, and he’s also geek royalty for starring in Hellboy and TV’s Beauty and the Beast, but this also goes to show you that underneath all that creature make-up he’s got a huge heart of gold.
