The things some actors will do for their art. In the TNT Original movie Bad Apple, Robert Patrick, the X-Files ex, sports spiky, bleach-blond hair, matching yellow glasses and a paisley scarf to become a freewheeling, chainsaw-wielding, psychopathic mobster named Tommy Bells. It's an outrageous look, an outrageous role, an outrageous performance.
"It was great for the character," Robert says of altering his appearance so extremely. "But there was definitely a downside." Because once he committed to this look onscreen, he had to live with what he had created 24/7, even when cameras weren't rolling.
"And that's not something I enjoyed," he admits. "The hair, wow! I usually wore a knit cap over it. Because I just couldn't go out in public like that. I remember having dinner with an actor buddy of mine in New York. I came down to the hotel lobby to meet him with this hair uncovered and he looked at me and just said, 'You've got to be kidding, right? We're not going out like that, are we? For real? We're going to have dinner with you looking like that? Don't you have something to cover that up with?'"
In short, the hairstyle cramped his style in daily life. But when cameras were rolling, being Tommy Bells was a liberating experience.
"The reason I wanted to do this project was that the character is so out there," Robert says. "Because, including John Doggett (his X-Files role) and this new film that I just finished called Ladder 49, which is about firefighters, I've been playing all these very stoic characters. Then I read the Bad Apple script and this guy, Tommy Bells, just jumps out of the page at me. It's so much fun not to have to get quiet and totally introspective all the way through it. Just being out there and as wild as I want to be. I was kind of a (jerk) on the set too, a little bit of a guy walking around with a spoon stirring things up, just to see the effect. It was a lot of fun."
Robert -- whose first claim to pop-culture fame was as the evil T-1000, a.k.a. "Liquid Metal Guy," in Terminator 2 (1991) -- is unsure what the loyal X-Files fans, people who see him in a heroic light, will think of Tommy Bells. "But most of the fans," he says, "I think they'll understand that I'm an actor looking for different kinds of things to do. I think they'll dig it."
Actually, he probably has no reason to worry. When Robert joined the X-Files cast in 2000 during season eight, his wife went on the Internet to scope out fan discussion on some of the X-Files chat rooms. "Next thing I know, she comes in shaking her head and saying, 'Wow, some of these people really hate you!'" That reaction, of course, was premature. Those skeptics hadn't yet seen him as FBI agent John Doggett. They merely assumed that his arrival, coinciding with the phasing out of David Duchovny as Agent Fox Mulder, was a development that would ruin their beloved show, a modern-day sci-fi classic.
But then the Doggett episodes started playing and it quickly became evident that steely-eyed Robert Patrick was a solid addition to the series. "I run into X-Files fans from time to time in different places," he says with pride, "and they still remind me how they hated me when I started but that I won them over. And let me tell you something: I wish the show had continued on. I really miss that gig. I loved it. I loved the character and I was having a ball with it."
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by David Martindale
