What are you doing to prepare for the Fantastic Four sequel?
”I’m not doing anything. I hate to answer as boringly as that, but we haven’t gotten a script yet. A script hasn’t been put out. And, I’m not going to start until the end of August/September. Right now, I’m literally every day, 16 hours a day, on Nip/Tuck, so there’s nothing I can do right now.”
Having read so many Fantastic Four comic books, is there something you’d like to do with Dr. Doom from those?
”There’s so many, and it’s really difficult because the Marvel world is split up between a bunch of different property ownerships, so what you can do and what you can’t do kind of depends on who owns it. Fox owns a certain part of it and Marvel owns a certain part of it, so that really decides where we’re going. They come up with the ideas and they come up with the scripts, and I just go and perform.”
Will there be more mask work for you in the sequel?
”No, actually, it’s mostly just me, like me. I haven’t gotten a script yet, but I’ve been told that Dr. Doom creates a fembot-like copy of himself, or something. I don’t know what it is. I’m kidding. I know that that idea was out there, and I just thought it was funny.”
Did you have any make-up problems? How was your make-up process?
”I was in make-up for up to 10 hours, and that is 10 hours before I started a 13 or 14 hour day. It was just part of the job. It was a pain in the ass. You get in there, literally, at 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning. So, your alarm goes off at 11:45 pm, you get up, have a shower, you’re thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ You go to work, you get in your outfit, you sit there for 9 or 10 hours with people poking away at your face and arms, and then you go to work and you do what you’ve got to do.”
Are they going to make it any easier on you this time around?
”I don’t think there’s going to be as many prosthetics. That was tough. I’d rather not do it again, but at the same time, I’ve signed up to do what I need to do. I was the one that came up with a lot of it. I was kicking myself afterwards. They were going to do a bandage, and I was like, ‘What about if he has a scar, or maybe his flesh starts peeling off here?’ And they were like, ‘Great idea!’ So I created a bit of that problem, but I thought it was a good [idea]. I liked the way he started picking tacks out of his head, and stuff. It was small, but it just added that extra element to the character that I thought was interesting.”
What was the movie you did this summer?
”I did a movie with Sandra Bullock called Premonition, which is coming out in March. It’s a psychological thriller. I play her husband. That’s a tough one to talk about. The best way to describe it is that she wakes up one morning, with her beautiful happy life and her wonderful husband and her children, to find out that her husband has been killed. And then, she wakes up the next morning and he’s not, and then it continues on that kind of vein.”
So, did she dream it?
”Well, that’s the question. That’s definitely part of it.”
How was working with Sandra Bullock?
”Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. We shot for five months in Shreveport, Louisiana. The great thing about this business is the ability to go and travel to different cultures and different places. I’d never spent time in Louisiana, and I never had crawfish before, so just that was wonderful, let alone getting to work with Sandy, who is pretty much as big as it gets in this business, ever. It was just a great experience. It really was.”
Did you get a break after that?
”I took a month off.”
What did you do with that month?
”I did absolutely nothing. I spent the whole month with my daughter and I actually had a couple friends from Australia come out, who I hadn’t seen for a few years.”
Page 2: Julian McMahon Discusses Nip/Tuck
