‘Channel Zero’ Star Rutger Hauer Wants To Give You More Nightmares

Rutger Hauer has a long history with offbeat genre roles, dating back to his role as the title character in Dutch drama Floris. Over 50 years into his career, the Blade Runner star continues to imbue his roles with visceral intensity (literally) as one of  the stars of “Butcher’s Block,” the new season of Channel Zero, SyFy’s anthology series adapting internet-based creepypasta. Hauer plays Joseph Peach, the patriarch of a clan of seemingly immortal, demonic cannibals who takes a paternal interest in the season’s dual sibling protagonists, Zoe and Alice Woods (played by Holland Roden and Olivia Luccardi, respectively). Hauer Skyped with Decider to discuss Channel Zero, reminisce on his recent starring role in a videogame, and clarify his feelings on Blade Runner 2049.

DECIDER: How did you get involved with Channel Zero? Had you seen any of the show before you were approached about doing this season?

Rutger Hauer: No. It was completely new to me, because I’m all over the place, and I don’t have SyFy on my phone. [laughs] I hadn’t seen it before, but I had six episodes, and it took me a long time because I had to read all the scripts. The format of six hours and that’s the end of it felt very attractive, because it doesn’t hang you as an actor. I adore my freedom to do what I feel is fun. I worked my way through the six episodes to see what it was they had, because it’s a big script—the biggest one I’ve seen in a long time. I’d seen [director] Arkasha Stevenson’s first short film and thought she was really talented. So I thought the whole thing was so attractive from the beginning on, because there were so many new things in it.

We worked for about a month, almost, before we started shooting—on the costume, the makeup. Nick [Antosca], the maker of this thing, we were very much on the same page with what we thought that we were doing, with the director and the producer. The four of us were like a team, working like crazy before the shoot, because when you shoot you’re just shooting, basically, and you have to know where you’re going to go.

Were you familiar with creepypasta before, or any other internet-based horror?

The whole thing was completely new to me, because the horror has a home—it’s not just for the sake of horror, it cuts deeper than that. I was looking for where the roots would be, so to speak. I wanted to see how much of a real character you could carve out from the whole thing without overdoing it. My whole thing is always that I want to make myself fit into roles that they offer me.

One of my favorite things about the season is the way it treats mental illness and schizophrenia.

The first thing that I thought was really interesting was that these were all dream characters—nightmare characters, so to speak—and sort of mentally unstable girls. So I felt that they were creating the character for me, creating the character to haunt them. I was thinking of myself as sort of the god of dreams, the bad ones and the good ones. So I became a bad dream. And this character, he’s mourning his lost daughters, and finds out that his god is sort of a weird dog who is sort of like a pedophile—and that was too much for a believer to be able to follow. So at the end he revolts against his maker.

I haven’t seen all of them yet!

Me neither. I haven’t seen five or six. I’m curious how it ends.

Tell me about filming those cannibalism scenes. There are a lot of entrails.

Those scenes were shot in the park in the complete dark with candles—everything was there pretty much, on a nice table. I thought the weirdest part was we, the family was the weirdest part. It was fun to get some dark humor in there, too. I had help from my grandson, who I originally had no scenes with. If I had shitty, bad lines I gave them to him, because he was much better at misbehaving. I felt that I couldn’t misbehave too much, because I was the father of all these kids.

It’s interesting that you talk about Joseph Peach as a family man, when it seems like he’s supposed to be the villain of the show.

What can I say? We’re all villains, okay. Or we’re all good people. I don’t play villains, I play characters that I give as much blood, soul, and humor as I can come up with. To me, of course, he’s just a funny guy, like a lot of us. And he has a goal, and when he gets betrayed, he explodes. And I hope the audience is still with me when that happens.

You did an interview a few weeks ago where you said that studio movies today “lack balls.” What’s the last movie you saw that had that quality?

The Spanish-language film, Biutiful. There have been some really good films, and ballsy too, but in general I think there’s a lot more shit than 20 years ago, let’s put it that way. But I feel stupid when I say these things, because you don’t need to vomit on your audience. And my own opinion about my own work or someone else’s work doesn’t matter that much. The audience is smart enough to make up their own minds, and if the audience likes Blade Runner 2, of course. But that question kept following me, the question about Blade Runner. I never answered it, but then I found that I couldn’t not answer some of it, and that’s where I came from.

I do think in the last 20, 30 years we’ve lost a lot of our identity as filmmakers. I don’t know how we allowed it, but it’s the only thing we have. I like to surprise people—that’s my function. It doesn’t matter what character I play.

I’m sure it must be stressful to have people repeatedly ask about this movie you weren’t in.

It’s just that the movie was coming out. I had to say what I thought about the idea. You can do remakes of certain movies, I just didn’t get this one. Maybe I need 30 more years to get it.

By the time the third one comes out.

Yes, exactly. They’re two completely different movies. They’re so different from each other, but at the same time one is leaning on the other. I think that’s unfair. They should have called it whatever else, but now it’s also leaning on Blade Runner. And that’s funny, because a lot of the characters in the original Blade Runner are replicants and copies!

You starred in Observer, which was the first videogame you’ve been in. How was that different from filming Channel Zero?

It’s basically voice. I did one radio thing a while ago, and I realized in radio every word has to be heard, otherwise you lose the audience. You cannot mumble, and I’m like a professor of mumbling. In a film, that tends to work, because you’re making noise and shuffling around people’s hearing and the way they understand what you’re saying. It’s quite nice, because you pull them in that way—but it doesn’t work without the visuals. I had to make the voice key to the game. I don’t know how I did it, but it was written very well, and I worked on it longer than I’ve worked on a play or film, ever. There were so many side roads in the game, where I had to find a different note and make fun of it if I could.

Did you play the game when it was done?

No. I didn’t know how to play it. But I’ve seen people on YouTube playing the game and talking about it, where they land how they did. So I got a response from people playing it, but I didn’t play it myself. I wouldn’t know how to do it.

What were those videos like?

They play the game, and you’re watching the game, how they play it, and they’re commenting on what they find and what they think is going to happen. When we released it, I was told it was a six-hour game, which is a medium game—but a lot of people spent longer on it, and I was happy about that, because there were a lot of opportunities to screw with their heads. How could people stand that for so long? Amazing!

Thanks for talking to me. I love Channel Zero, and I hope more people watch it.

It’s not for everybody, and I understand that. But I like my nightmares. I can only say that later—when I had them, I didn’t like them. We’re giving people more nightmares.

Eric Thurm’s writing also appears in GQ, Esquire, Real Life, and eventually in a book about board games he is writing for the NYU Press and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also the founder, producer, and host of Drunk Education, a comedic-academic event series that has absolutely nothing to do with TED.