Peter Weller looks like an android. On the surface he has movie star good looks - tall, blue eyes, square jaw - but examine him closer and you’ll see none of it seems to fit. His face is taut and angular, his eyes are set deep in his skull and his skin looks like it’s made out of moulded plastic. His voice too is monotone and nasal – he reads lines like it’s in his programming. He was made to play Robocop (1987).
As Alex Murphy, the police officer executed by street hoods and then resurrected as a mechanical super cop, Weller gives a commanding performance. He stomps through the streets of Old Detroit like a technological knight in shining armour; his cyborg body moving with maximum efficiency, his chrome body reflecting the neon lights of a broken city.
“DEAD OR ALIVE,” he utters to criminals in an unemotive, basso voice. “YOU’RE COMING WITH ME.”
But he doesn’t just play Robocop, he becomes him totally. For the film he seems to shut down whatever makes him Peter Weller and reboots an android psychology. With his eyes hidden, he had to learn to act with his body, training for months with a mime artist and devouring books on robotics. As a result his gestures have a mechanized grace, using as little movement as possible to turn, raise his gun, and reduce the bad guys to screaming chunks of red mess.
Director Paul Verhoeven originally wanted either Rutger Hauer or Scanners (1980) star Michael Ironside for the part. But both men turned it down, understandably dissuaded by the prospect of spending six and a half hours a day in the make up chair. As Verhoeven had warned them:
“It will be a life of suffering.”
Indeed it was. Filmed in Dallas, Texas during a heat wave, Weller lost pounds of weight and, locked in that massive suit (designed by effects genius Rob Bottin), had to battle against claustrophobia and dehydration. The actor took to meditating to get himself through it. Amazingly his performance never suffers. The movie is essentially a search for humanity in a world dominated by product and corporate greed. And Robocop is the ultimate product, a machine lawman built to replace his human counterparts. But behind the suit is Alex Murphy and Weller slowly allows his humanity to creep to the surface. His gestures become more human (the spinning of the gun, the wry smile) and his voice begins to lighten. With his helmet removed Murphy’s eyes are dead and unblinking but Weller, somehow, is acting from behind those eyes, showing a living soul struggling to get out. Despite the baroque grandness of the character Weller is amazingly subtle. He began on stage in New York. He studied Dramatic Arts and trained at the Actors Studio (as Marlon Brando and Al Pacino had before him). Later he became a theatrical leading man, appearing in David Mamet’s The Woods and Otto Preminger’s Full Circle. Here he stared opposite Leonard Nimoy and he credits the Mr Spock actor as one of his mentors (years later he guest stared in Star Trek: Enterprise as homage). Weller became an assured performer and was praised for:
“The sense of realism and truth,” he brought to his Broadway performances. He brings this to whatever he does.
If ever a part allowed him to go over the top, then surely it was his role in 1984s The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the Eighth Dimension.
Here he plays Banzai, a superhero neurosurgeon, particle physicist, Kung Fu fighting rock guitarist who battles a hoard of fascist aliens all called John. Despite the absurdities, Weller has the audacity to play it straight. Dressed like a sort of rock-a-billy new romantic superhero (with a greased haircut, big shoulder pads and an electric guitar), he still manages to underplay the odd premise. He delivers lines with deadpan precision, whether he’s stopping a rock gig (with his band The Hong Kong Cavillers) to emote with a sobbing fan:
“Is someone out there crying in the darkness?”
or showing a disregard for those in power:
SOLDIER: “The President’s calling, Buckaroo.”
BUCKAROO: “President of what?”
There is no knowing smile or wink at the camera and as a result the film never descends into a camp pastiche. Accordingly Buckaroo Banzai remains an unhinged and totally bewildering cult classic. But then Weller has had his fair share of bizarre roles.
In 1983s Of Unknown Origin he played Bart Hughes, an aspirational yuppie whose home is terrorised by a rat…a REALLY, REALLY BIG RAT. He transforms from a man obsessed by cleanliness into a deranged maniac willing to destroy his beautiful house in order to pulverise his hairy intruder. The film concludes with Bart fashioning a weapon out of a baseball bat and bear-traps, wandering around in the dark with a torch strapped to his head. For his troubles Weller won a Best Actor Award at the Paris Festival of Fantasy. He seems drawn to odd roles and is perhaps a little odd himself.
In the 60s he was into acid and hallucinogenic drugs. In the 70s he binged on cocaine before waking up one morning and quitting just as suddenly as he started. He speaks five languages and has a PhD in fifteenth-century Venetian Art. He’s is a fiercely intelligent man, but also a hard one to peg down. In interviews he comes across like a beat philosopher, a hip cat who seems like he’d be more at home in a 1950s New York coffeehouse. He’s has a cool and lethargic presence that oozes laidback style. He’s a musician too; plays the trumpet in a jazz band with Buckaroo Banzai co-star Jeff Goldblum. It is perhaps this mixture of drug past and beat cool that lead him to Naked Lunch (1991).
The 1957 novel by William S. Burroughs, a weird and mind-altering journey into drugs, homosexuality and dripping hallucinations, was for many years deemed unfilmable. Cronenberg’s adaptation takes elements of the novel and fuses them with anecdotes from Burroughs’ own life (the accidental shooting of his wife, his job as an exterminator) to create a more tangible narrative for which protagonist Bill Lee to wander through. Weller petitioned for the part, writing Cronenberg a long letter asking to be considered for the lead. The director discovered him to not only have a physical and vocal similarity to Burroughs, but also a huge knowledge of the writer and his work. Weller was perfect. As giant beetles transform into typewriters and Mugwumps omit oozing, addictive cum from their tentacles, Weller once again used his real, minimalist approach as a centre point to the weirdness. When the hallucinations begin, and Bill Lee is confronted by a giant beetle talking from its anus, Weller’s reaction is nothing more than a slight widening of his eyes – and it says it all. In Weller’s hands Lee is a man wading through a drug fog – a man tormented by both his latent homosexuality and the murder of his wife. He shifts from blank observation to junkie sweats to a broken man lost in a world that is both diseased and predatory. Weller does it all with an unnatural ease.
The screenplay included passages from Burroughs’s writings and Weller clearly revels in the chance to deliver these monologues. As he sits in the passenger seat of a car driving through the Interzone, Lee tumbles out a story about a man who taught his arsehole to speak. Weller delivers it in that nasal twang with the perfect mix of dry rhythm and deadpan humour:
“The ass started to eat its way through his pants and talking on the street. It wanted equal rights. It would get drunk too and have crying jags. Nobody loved it. It wanted to be kissed like any other mouth.
Since Naked Lunch film roles have been no less forthcoming, but perhaps a little less prominent. In 1995 he stared in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite and the same year went back to being a sci-fi action hero as Col. Joe Hendrickson in the cheap but fun Screamers. In pictures like Top of the World (1997) and The Contaminated Man (2000) Weller has become a straight to DVD leading man. He perhaps deserves better and, in films like Ivansxtc (2000), he occasionally gets it. Here he repulses as the ego-driven megastar actor Don West, a man who is fashionably late for funerals, deeply homophobic, misogynistic and totally self obsessed.
“If I had a chance to fuck your girlfriend,” he tells his agent Ivan. “Yeah, I’d fuck her in every orifice she had and run her out of town on a fucking flagpole.”
To which Ivan offers a grovelling apology. West is a man with too much power and no morals. He cares about no one. In recent years Weller’s career has found its way into television and has had decent part in both Monk (which he also directed) and 24 (as the man who taught Jack Bauer everything he knows). He even managed a return to the stage in 2006 playing Frank Lloyd Wright in the play Frank’s Home. As well as getting his PhD and spending time to study in Italy, Weller has also moved into directing, getting behind the camera on the Academy Award nominated short Partners and directing for television. He seemingly never stops. If the man is indeed an android, then he seems a long way from ever being shut down. And thank the maker for that.
Tom Fallows is a well respected writer and soon to be published author when the pocket essential guide to George A. Romero’s work hits stands in October.
This article is the fifth in the marvellous Cult Actors Series…
Cult Actors #4 - Peter Weller
Cult Actors #3 - Rutger Hauer
Cult Actors #2– Adrienne Barbeau
Cult Actors #1: Brad Dourif
