Oded Fehr on His Favorite Death Scene, Playing Villains and Working With Director Paul W.S. Anderson on Resident Evil: Retribution
Posted 07.16.12 by BrentJS
Israel-born actor Oded Fehr has played many different types of roles in his 14-year career — a member of an ancient group of holy warriors in The Mummy, a male prostitute in Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, a terrorist in the Showtime series Sleeper Cell — but he admits that he's often offered the role of the villain: "I can't help it. I have a deep voice and I look like a bad guy. People think I'm a bad guy." Being typecast as a villain doesn't really bother Fehr, however, because he finds the role of a villain offers him more "opportunity" to "bring so many colors to the character."
Fehr will get the chance to play both hero and villain in his latest movie, Resident Evil: Extinction, his third movie in the 5-movie franchise based on the Capcom video game series. Fans of the series know that his character, Carlos Olivera, died in Resident Evil: Extinction, but just as actress Michelle Rodriguez's deceased character, Rain Ocampo, will return as "Good Rain and...Bad Rain", so too will Fehr get to play good and bad cloned versions of Carlos Olivera in Retribution. In a recent roundtable interview in support of the movie, Fehr discussed his "really nice death scene" in Extinction, his preference for playing villains, and once again working with the "kid", writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson.
Here are some highlights from the interview:
0:00 — "I had a good death scene, too. And, I tell you, I was so proud of that death scene. It was a really nice death scene. You know, giving myself up for everyone else. And then everything blows up as I'm smoking what we presume might or might not be an illegal substance."
0:30 — "I never got to work with Paul as a director before. And Paul is so phenomenal. So much fun to work with. And he really just enjoys himself. He has a blast. When I first met him on #2 [Resident Evil: Apocalypse], you know, he just seemed like this, almost, like a kid who just plays video games, to me, you know. And he kept a lot of that."
1:23 — "What I did was I went back and watched all of the movies before we shot this one ... and it's amazing to watch Milla kind of gracefully age from #1 [Resident Evil]. Because #1 she looks like this teenager, like this young baby girl. And then all of a sudden in #4 [Resident Evil: Afterlife] she's this beautiful, elegant almost, mature woman, you know."
3:05 — "[Retribution is] really beautiful. It's really, really, really beautiful. I was lucky enough to see some scenes. I visited Paul at the editing room and it's absolutely gorgeous. He really made it into an art film.
5:12 — "[The 3D] really, really looks amazing. And for this kind of film, 3D just gives you so many options. It makes it so...it gives you the option to make it so beautiful."
7:44 — "There's something that's very attractive about [playing villains]. You get to be good when you're wanting to be good, but then you get to be really evil. You get to bring so many colors to the character that you're playing. Whereas, when you're playing just a good guy who's just trying to survive, you're just trying to survive and you're just good. And you don't do bad things. You're not naughty. So, you don't get as much of a range. You don't get the opportunity to do as much of a range."
Resident Evil: Retribution stars Milla Jovovich as Alice, Sienna Guillory as Jill Valentine, Colin Salmon as One, Boris Kodjoe as Luther West, Kevin Durand as Barry Burton, Johann Urb as Leon S. Kennedy, Oded Fehr as Carlos Olivera, Li Bingbing as Ada Wong, and Colin Salmon as One. It opens September 14th.