Eric Balfour, star of Haven which airs Fridays at 10:00 pm on Syfy, participated in a conference call Q & A to talk about his character in the show and about last Friday night’s episode.
Can you tell us about the process the prosthetics for the episode “Ball and Chain” and how was it to work with it?
Eric Balfour: Yes. You know, it was actually really crazy. Even in prepping for it we were so under the gun because we were in the middle of shooting another episode.
And it came down to just even at the beginning they had to fly me from where we shoot the show in Halifax on a redeye to Toronto at like – it was 11 o’clock at night. And I flew in and I had a few hours sleep and then I went to the visual effects artist’s studio and they started doing the face mold and cast.
And, it’s that weird process where you have to, you know, they put a bunch of plaster on your face and alginate. And you sit there with a little straw coming out of your mouth and trying not to get claustrophobic. And so we had to do it really, really quickly. But they had a few days to prep and then they showed up on set with these different prosthetic pieces.
And, we’ve been talking about it for a few days before about how the aging would take place and the different stages of ages I would go through the first one being a light prosthetic and mostly just makeup use. That would age me about 20 or 30 years.
And then from there you go to about 75 or 80 years old and then to about 95 and then all the way up to, you know, well we hope to about 100 years old because Duke’s going to live a long time or so we thought. But it was a pretty intense process. I mean it was about four or five hours every day in the makeup chair.
But to be honest it was so helpful once you started getting into the prosthetic because we had talked about the different physical attributes that come along with the way that your body can, you know, degenerate over time and the physical abilities you lose and the joint dexterity and your voice changes.
And but the minute we started putting on the prosthetics it makes that whole process so much easier. It was crazy. It was a little scary at times because you’re looking at yourself going is this really what I’m going to look like in 30 years, 40 years? But in some ways it was interesting because some of it was very correct. You could see wow, that’s what my face is going to do. Given the nature of that it’s not, you know, reality. And it is still an artistic, you know, conception of what you look like.
It was interesting to see even the makeup artists themselves, the visual artists, they’d look and go oh you know what? Now having spent a little more time looking at the way you use your face these two wrinkles won’t really happen to you, but you’re going to get a wrinkle here not there. Unless of course you’re terrified of having them and have been looking up supplements to prevent them (such as these beverly hills md reviews). But the majority of people will find themselves with some before the age of 50, and so it was really fun to play with that.
And then we went through a long conversation about facial hair. Because there was this sort of – a question of well okay so if you’re aging really quickly would the hair continue to grow at the same rate and if you didn’t shave it would you have it? So as you probably have seen in some of the pictures I have at one point this really sort of long goatee, this wispy long Fu Manchu goatee… because we just – we decided to play on the idea that well if you’ve got facial hair and he doesn’t cut it would just keep growing. And then eventually, you know, as you got really old you would just start to lose your ability to grow hair and that would all fall away.
But it was intense. I mean I had to show up hours before everybody on set and sit in the makeup chair and try to keep myself awake all day. And then it’d take about an hour and a half after everyone left at the end of the day to get it all off.
And we did like three or four straight days of that. And it was intense but those guys were amazing. And it was just – it’s so much fun to like – to be perfectly honest, I haven’t gotten a lot of opportunities to dive into that sort of heavy a character development as far as totally taking on a different character.
And although it was a character I play it’s at an age that I’ve never played or at a physicality that I’ve never played. So it was really fun as an actor to get to really put on a character, you know, not just a maybe a little bit of an accent but to really – you know, my favorite actors growing up were guys like, you know, Gary Oldman and Daniel Day Louis and Sean Penn and guys who really were magical, Meryl Streep, were incredible actors at creating completely different chameleon characters.
And Gary Oldman being really one of my biggest inspirations because he, no matter how big he takes a character and how out there it seems it’s always so realistic. It’s always so believable in some ways. And I’m just – I’m fascinated by the work that he does and it’s always something that I wanted to do. So even getting that opportunity even if it’s only for a few days was really special to me.
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