Ron Perlman shouldn’t be here. I’m standing in the middle of another day glow multiplex, with sticky popcorn under my shoes and surrounded by a gaggle of over excited teens who I know are going to yak their way through the same movie I’m seeing and alls I can think is one thing – Ron Perlman shouldn’t be here.

But there he is, his giant face looming down from a Hellboy 2 poster, snuggled in between Christian Bale’s Dark Knight and Harrison Ford’s heroic archaeologist. The poster tells me that Ron Perlman is the star of a major summer blockbuster. How the hell did Ron Perlman get up there?

He’s not a movie star, he’s a cult actor; a dead end kid with a face like a stepped in puddle of mud. He’s a scared space pirate, a Neanderthal man, a freak living in the sewers of New York. He’s an alien viceroy, a castaway monster on a desert island, he’s a hunchback abandoned by God.

But then in Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (2008) Perlman’s face is, typically, buried behind heavy make-up. His skin is devil red, he has filed down horns and his jaw looks like it’s built out of granite. It’s a four hour job, overseen by make-up effects maestro Rick Baker, to make Perlman look this pretty, but he isn’t complaining. It’s nothing he hasn’t done before.

In a career spanning nearly 30 years Perlman has become a sort of modern day Lon Chaney, using various applied masks to create a disparate rogues gallery of oddballs. Even in his film debut, as a prehistoric man in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Quest for Fire (1981), his face was hidden

Annaud was looking for people with an unevolved physicality and Perlman attended an open casting call. Waiting to be called into the director’s office, the 31-year old actor found himself surround by an array of odd looking guys whose knuckles barely left the floor.

“There was all manner of humanity in there,” recalls Perlman. “I thought, my God, is this how I’m perceived in the world?”

He has a rugged, primitive face that Annaud was sure would require minimal prosthetics. But for once Perlman’s face wasn’t ugly enough and he was given long matted hair, rotten teeth, a thick forehead and protruding overbite to look more convincing as a man from 80,000 years into our past.

Yet, none of this stopped Perlman from delivering a beautifully measured performance. He is simple and good humoured, and adds a much needed lightness to an otherwise dark film; chowing down on various insects and taking a falling boulder to the head with deadpan perfection.

Impressed, Annaud recalled Perlman in 1986 to play the deformed hunchback Salvatore in his medieval murder mystery In the Name of the Rose. Here he is once again disguised; his body twisted and mouth toothless – a victim of torture by the Inquisition. He is retched, half-mad and speaks in tongues. Despite this, there is an innocence that shines through Perlman’s eyes and as a result, even when he’s out collecting rats for supper, the character never loses our sympathy.

In 1987 Perlman’s skill at creating fully realised characters from behind layers of prosthetics won him the title role in CBS’s Beauty and the Beast. The series was a modern day fairytale, with Linda Hamilton as a New York lawyer who comes into contact with a whole community living in the city’s sewers.

Among them is Vincent (Perlman), a towering figure with long blonde hair and the face of a lion. But far from being a beast, Vincent is tragically romantic and spends his time reading poetry and reciting sonnets.

Women all over America fell in love with both the character’s sensitivity and Perlman’s soft, yet powerful voice. The actor was awarded a Golden Globe and the program should have turned him into an instant star. But with his face unseen, people overlooked the fact that there was actually a skilled actor behind the Beast’s animal appearance.

Following the show’s cancellation, Perlman became reluctant to don anymore movie masks, and decided to show his face onscreen more often. Hollywood wasn’t interested.

So instead he hunted the fringes of TV, voice work (another chance to hide his pug face) and low budget cinema. In 1993, seemingly tired of American movies all together, he headed south to Mexico and began a friendship that would eventually lead him back to the mainstream.

Cronos was director Guillermo Del Toro’s debut picture, a vampire story convcerning an old man granted eternal life by an ancient clockwork device. The director was tired of seeing foreign actors play villains in American movies, so decided get revenge by casting Perlman as the nominal bad guy. He had a field day.

Angel De La Guardia wants his dying uncle’s millions, but to prove it he must steal the Cronos device and remain at his relative’s beck and call. He’s a brute – a no good heavy with a concrete jaw and grazed knuckles. Alls he wants is money – money to finally afford the nose job he’s always dreamed of.

Perlman sniffs his way through the film, smelling everything he sees with a doglike curiosity. He has about the same intelligence too and the actor plays Angel as a kind of sun baked mutt who hides his slobbering mentality behind a pin strip suit, sleazy charm and a shit eating grin.

Also like a dog he is submissive in the presence of his boss, “Here I am, uncle,” he whimpers, but then growls insults out of earshot, “What the fuck is it now, you dried up old prune?”

Only Ron Perlman, with that mean face and childlike eyes, could be so feeble and imposing at the same time.

The part drew Perlman international (if not American) acclaim and in 1995 he was hand picked for Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Juenet’s The City of Lost Children. With a carrot-top and green sweater, Perlman play’s a kind-hearted strongman in search of his missing infant brother. That mix of innocence and strength seems to have defined his career.

He was the only non-French speaking member of the production, but remained enthusiastic throughout. So much so that when Jeunet came to direct his first American movie Alien Resurrection (1997) he fought to have Perlman in the cast. He is always, it seems, a welcome precence on set.

Born in New York in 1950 (across the bridge from Yankee Stadium) to a Jewish family, Perlman knew since High School that he had to act. He claims he couldn’t do anything else. But Hollywood is a place that prefers beauty to the beast, and Ron’s tough guy face kept him out of soaps and commercials.

When his daughter was born, Ron, with no jobs on the horizon, became a house husband and looked after the kid while his wife went to work. Rather than get bitter, Perlman learnt to appreciate the roles he got and to enjoy every minute of it. Never was this harder than in 1996’s The Island of Dr Moreau.

Though the actor had begun to carve out a neat career away from make-up acting, he was tempted back by an offer to work with legend Marlon Brando. Here he played another of his beast men – The Sayer of the Law – an animal experimented on to give it human characteristics. The shoot was plagued with trouble.

The director was fired, the schedule ran over and lead actor Val Kilmer was often nowhere to be seen. When veteran director John Frankenheimer took over the helm, he refused to tolerate Kilmer’s behaviour and halted production whenever he failed to show. This often left Perlman in full make-up without shooting a single frame.

Unperturbed, Perlman became more willing to return to make-up acting and in 2002 appeared as the Nosferatu-like Reman Viceroy in Star Trek: Nemesis. Also that year, he played a vampire hood in Guillermo Del Toro’s Blade 2 but both director and star had their minds on something else. Hellboy.

Del Toro had optioned Mike Mignola’s comic back in 1997 and was adamant that no one but his friend Ron Perlman could play this fusion of God, the devil and blue collar everyman.

Creator Mignola was in complete agreement:

“Just sitting around by himself, [Ron] was Hellboy.

The studios wanted Vin Diesel, not some 53-year old character actor with a face only a mother could love. But Del Toro held firm, and Perlman turned it into to a career defining role, an amalgamation of everything he had done before.

Hellboy is a demon of destruction, but one who works for the government by laying the smack down on, “things that go bump in the night,” with his red right hand of doom. He is destined to bring about the end of days, but was raised by man, and grew up to be a cigar chewing, pancake eating Joe who likes nothing more than to relax in front of the TV with a cold beer.

Perlman plays the characters as another of his innocents. He has the mind of a teenager and wisecracks his way threw various clashes with evil titans.

“That’s all for you, pinhead,” he tells a Nazi clockwork soldier.

The character is also grumpy and lovesick for fire starter Liz Sherman (Selma Blair). In a standout scene, one that is oddly heartfelt for a film about giant monsters, Perlman and Del Toro both drew on childhoods of being the ugly outsider:

“I wish I could do something about this,” says Hellboy to Liz gesturing his demon face. “But I can’t. But I can promise you two things. One: I’ll always look this good, and two: I’ll never give up on you. Ever.”

Hellboy 2 is more comedic and lightweight, but Perlman is again note perfect. And while the film never quite lives up to his performance, its hard not to leave the cinema feeling giddy having watched Hellboy and his fish-man buddy Abe get drunk, listen to Barry Manilow and then get into a boozy brawl with the prince of the mystical realm.

Throughout his career Perlman has brought countless prosthetic masks to life, yet he refuses that easy comparison to the legendary Chaney (that “Man of a thousand faces,” from the silent era). But he should perhaps take it for the compliment it is meant to be.

There have been a number of great “make-up performance,” – Karloff’s monster in Frankenstein (1931), Howard Sherman in Day of the Dead (1985) – but so few actors have been able to do this time and again with character after character. Perlman has and, in time, will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Chaney as one of cinema’s finest hidden performers. Both men, in this writer’s opinion, are masters of their craft.

This is because Perlman’s greatest asset is not his unconventional mug, but his gentle eyes and a voice that can be both tender and ferocious. Hellboy 2 probably won’t keep him a star for very long and, like with Beauty and the Beast, will see him vanish behind the character he gives breath to. We should just enjoy while we can.

Standing in this day-glow cinema it may be hard to shake the feeling that Ron Perlman shouldn’t be here. But thank heaven he is. Or should that be hell?

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