GRIMM -- "Three Coins in a Fuchsbau" Episode 113 -- Pictured: Titus Welliver -- (Photo by: Scott Green/NBC)
Veteran film, TV and stage actor Titus Welliver plays a jewel thief monster involved in an intricate plot on Grimm tonight. There’s good news all around since Welliver‘s character is likely to be recurring and he doesn’t have to go through the 6-hour makeup ordeal that other monsters on the show have to endure.
Because of allergy issues created by effects makeup (learned the hard way years ago on a film), Welliver‘s facial transition scenes are computer generated.
Welliver tells us that his entrance into film from the New York theater, over 20 years ago, came with a lesson. “It’s been an effort,” Welliver tells Entertainment Heartbeat. “I think oftentimes if you do something fairly well people want you to repeat it, so, very early on in my career I was cast in a roll playing Al Capone’s brother…From the New York stage (I) had a nice career playing leading men, and then I got this role playing this polar opposite.”
But then something happens that Welliver doesn’t quite see coming.
“So I gained 65 pounds and that was not easy, and then the film came out and it was well received, and I said okay, great, let’s start to reap the benefits of the success of this film,” Welliver says, voice rising as he gets to the not-so-funny part. “and then my agent would say, but you don’t look like you did a year ago; a year ago you were a tall, well muscled leading man, and now you’re a big, hulking 215 pound guy, and it was wild how we can delude ourselves into sort of forgetting these things, so, I then took almost a year and worked out very hard and got my body back to normal.”
But after getting himself back to his trim New York-era self there remained residual issues. “And even then I remember walking into a casting director’s office who had really only known my work on film and being heavy from the films I did while I had put on that weight; I still continued to work, I basically did the same thing, I played, you know, big thug roles, and she said, wow, you went on a diet, you look so great – I said, I didn’t go on a diet, and by the way, you know, I felt I had to carry around a head shot of me before I made that idiotic choice. I learned a great lesson from it; if I had to do it all over again, I would, I would gain the weight and play it exactly the same way, only I would make sure that I had a dietitian and a trainer who would help me expedite the loss of the weight in a more healthful fashion.”
While remaining a working actor is a good thing, being relegated into typecasting trivia for a versatile actor might be maddening. “I was sort of relegated to playing tough guys all the time, and then I met (Executive Producer/Writers) David Milch and Steven Bochco, and they were casting a role for NYPD Blue and it was the role of a trauma surgeon, and I said to my agent, they’re never going to cast me as a trauma surgeon because everybody here in Hollywood is still thinking I’m the tough New York guy, I said I’ll come back when they need a tough New York cop and he said, no, they know who you are,and they want you to read for this trauma surgeon role, so I went in reluctantly but wore a nice button down shirt and wore my reading glasses, went in and read and when I was done David Milch said, you like this part and I said, yeah, very much, he said, well, you’re going to play this part. I said, thank you, thank you, and as I was walking out David Milch said, don’t forget to really call your mom and dad.”
Aside from talent, pluck and luck appear to melt doors. “So from then on that kind of turned the tide, and I owe that to Steven Bochco. It took power players like Bochco and Milch in the television business to have me play a guy who was polysyllabic…”
While Welliver‘s career is far from over it’s still euphoric to hear a real Hollywood ending for a nice guy.
Grimm featuring Titus Welliver is on tonight (Friday) 9/8c on NBC.