Hey y’all.
I read a lot of great books last year, but one of the best was a new biography of cult actor Lance Henriksen. Published by a new Nashville book concern, Not Bad for a Human is a necessary read for Henriksen fans and anyone else who is interested in a fascinating look at how this artist finds his unique characters.
I was asked to review the book for the online art journal ArtNowNashville.com
A Portrait of the Artist on a Book Cover
In the television series Millennium, and in movies like Dog Day Afternoon, Aliens, Hard Target and Dead Man, Lance Henriksen is the bad guy you root for and the good guy you’re afraid to trust. The actor with the deep, gritty voice always brings complexity to cliches when embodying his characters, but never more so than when standing in his own shoes. Henriksen’s new biography is deep and delirious, cracked, crazy and carefully crafted. It’s also one of my favorite books of the year.
On the first page of Not Bad for a Human: The Life and Films of Lance Henriksen, the reader is greeted with an illustration of the book’s subject in his most famous big screen role as “Bishop” – the sympathetic android from the film Aliens. He’s pictured here just after one of the eponymous monsters has literally torn him in half – wires and tubes swim from beneath his ribcage, a pool of shiny white liquid spills across the page. The illustration is a fitting beginning to a life story that is simultaneously messy, absurd, painful and iconic.
The actor describes his first 20 years of life as “total chaos.” Abandoned by his dad as a young boy, the actor gave his first performances – claiming he’d traveled with his merchant marine father to exotic locales in Borneo and Fiji. Henriksen’s mother was a waitress who’d survived the Great Depression through charming but humiliating cons. Henriksen describes her as a good woman with real dreams but no skills to realize them. The pair often got by on creative scams with Henriksen cast in the role of the pitiful child. While the actor found real love and warmth among his grandparents and aunts, his stints at orphanages, foster homes and boarding schools found him becoming an illiterate dropout after the 3rd grade.
Henriksen crafted his own understanding of the world in the anonymous silence of movie theaters and in the boundless possibilities of the open road. “A lot of movies from that time told the same story,” Henriksen explains. “A man is born, he marries, he has kids, he dies. I thought ‘I don’t want my life to be like that. I want to live a thousand lifetimes!’” This thirst for experience saw the actor becoming a seasoned hitchhiker while still in his early teens, but it was in acting that Henriksen found the supportive, respectful family he’d always yearned for. Moving to New York, Henriksen embarked on a stage-acting career that found him regularly cast in angry-young-man roles, treading the boards in both New York and Boston and connecting with the community at the Actors Studio. It was the need to memorize scripts that slowly but surely taught the actor how to read.
In Not Bad, Henriksen revisits his first appearances on screen in unforgettable 1970′s films like Dog Day Afternoon, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Network. Playing minor characters in major movies, the actor was eager to show more of his chops. This lead to his pursuit of larger roles in small-budget genre films like Damien Omen II and Savage Dawn. The nearly-disastrous shooting of Piranha 2: The Spawning almost cost the actor his life. Instead, he found a close friend in James Cameron – the film’s young director. The connection would eventually bring Henriksen his breakthrough role in Aliens.
Henriksen’s book is penned by writer/filmmaker Joseph Maddrey. Maddrey’s prose is familiar, but focused. He ties up loose ends, creates effortless segues and illuminates Henriksen’s remembering with clarifying context. This frees the actor to ramble in running rants that blast the page with big blocks of separated quotations that are by turns profane and profound – and almost always hilarious. Henriksen’s anecdotes, recollections and revelations are the priceless stuff the book is built around, and this structure finds the actor’s voice coming through loud and clear, allowing the reader to experience Henriksen’s story directly from the man himself.
Laugh out loud funny, Not Bad for a Human manages to be both a poignant biography as well as the blazing-bright documenting of a life lived for art’s sake. While this volume would be a welcome addition to any cinephile’s bookshelf, it should be required reading for beginning actors. Henriksen isn’t giving lessons here, but he is offering a rare, inside-out glimpse at what it means to live the actor’s life.
Not Bad for a Human: The Life and Films of Lance Henriksen
Softcover
Author: Lance Henriksen and Joseph Maddrey
ISBN: 978-0983432500
Publisher: Alexander Henriksen Press
Limited Edition Hardcover Publisher: Bloody Pulp Books
Joe Nolan <3
