UNLIFE TO LIVE
Starlog June 1995

By Peter Bloch-Hansen
Copyright 1995 Starlog Group Inc. Reprinted with permission.

"I would be useless as a vampire," says Nigel Bennett, vampire master in the syndicated TV series Forever Knight. "I would starve to death," he groans."I get queasy and faint at [the sight of] blood. Stage blood is OK because I know that's just pretend. I keep telling that to my kids when they get scared at the movies."

Better known as LaCroix, the black-clad, brooding nemesis of Geraint Wyn Davies' Nick Knight, the tall, British-born actor laughs heartily. For him, bringing to unlife the deadly LaCroix is clearly a labor of love.

"I enjoy him a lot," Bennett discloses. "I really like his attitude on life...or undeath...whatever you want to call it. It's very direct, very childlike. A little kid says, ‘I want to do that.' and does it. LaCroix says, 'I want to do something,' and nobody can stop him because he has more power than most other people. He has given himself carte blanche. He wants to do it for his own reasons and if you don't like it, then tough on you. I like that attitude. I don't know how well it would work if more than one person were as powerful, though. It's wish-fulfillment. But he really has a directness which is refreshing in these days of political correctness and bending over backwards to say the right thing at the right time. It's nice to play someone who doesn't care about that and doesn't have to. He makes me laugh a lot of the time. He has a great sense of humor. When some policeman is threatening him with interrogation, he just says, 'Oh, try.' Also, he has this aristocratic view of life. I like this. Why would he be into anything else? Why should he not want the best after being alive for nearly 2,000 years?

"I would like him to become more central to the action. When my agent first sent me scripts for the role, I read the script for episode two and was on the phone straight away saying. 'What the heck are you talking about? This man's dead at the end of the second episode. How can he possibly be a series regular?' Then, they explained it to me. The vampires are always the backstory in each episode and the front story is always the cops. I personally would like it to be the other way around. I would like to see more of the flashbacks and more about the few hundred years when they actually enjoyed each other's company, when they were having fun -- vampires out for a night on the town."

Without any trace of boastfulness about LaCroix's great popularity with audiences, the actor discusses the fine line he walks in portraying the character. "In popular terms, he is the villain of the piece," Bennett acknowledges. "He represents what many people would regard as pure evil, but I don't think he sees himself as a bad person at all. I don't feel he's a bad person either. I would like audiences to, well, not sympathize with his position really, but just to accept him for who he is and not try to change him. I'm sure when he was younger, in vampire terms, he had the same doubts and troubles as Nick has now. It has taken him many hundreds of years, but he has come to terms with it and enjoys it. All he wants is to be accepted for that.'' Bennett laughs deeply. "My eight-year-old son has a T-shirt that says, 'You are what you are and you're OK.' And that's great.

"It's strange," he continues, "because most of the work I did in England was comedy on stage. I was pretty good at it. Here, most of the work I do is real bad-guy stuff on television. To succeed as a TV villain, you must be completely believable and people should be able to sympathize with you. You have to make them understand why you do the things you do, or at least convince them there is a reason, no matter how awful it is.

"LaCroix always has the best intentions for Nick. I think he looks after Nick. He sits and waits for him to come to terms, bit by bit, with the reality of his existence and who he is. LaCroix started off by trying to beat it into Nick. That clearly failed, so he has resorted to more persuasive means. He sees Nick in a process of growing up."

Bennett's ideas about his character dovetail with his theories about the current vogue enjoyed by the undead. "They represent a certain style that has completely disappeared," he suggests, "a certain romance and a lot of Old World manners which there isn't time for in modern living for most people. People like to see that. It's very mysterious, very dark. People have always been titillated by the mysterious, by the unknown. It's also very erotic, the idea of people biting each other. Have you ever noticed that whenever anyone is bitten by a vampire, you're not sure whether they're having an orgasm or dying?

"I actually did read Bram Stoker's Dracula years ago because I did a stage version. So, I looked up Vlad the Impaler and Elizabeth Bathory, who used to bathe in the blood of virgins because she thought it would keep her young. When I started doing this role, I didn't want to be too influenced by what other people had done, so I didn't read Interview With the Vampire until after the first year had finished. Also, I haven't seen the movie yet because I don't want someone to turn around and say, 'You're copying Tom Cruise.' I will see it though, if only to laugh at the actors trying to speak with the teeth in.

"My favorite ever vampire is of course, Christopher Lee in the Hammer Dracula movies. He was very arch, very aristocratic. He was into the best things of life, just like LaCroix. The new-style biker vampires are great, but they're very young in eternal terms. Even Nick is an adolescent and he's 720 years old. Biker vampires are just kids in diapers, really."

Though far younger than any of those, the time that Bennett has put in on the role makes him a veteran screen vampire. He has seen changes, both in himself as a performer and in the character. "Working in a series has polished my craft immensely," he reveals. "The directors don't do anything with you. They come on and they assume that you know what your character does and you know what to do and they leave you alone. They work with the guest players. Consequently, you practice a different aspect of the craft. Also, just doing a character once is relatively easy. When it's just a guest shot, the characters are often very two-dimensional. The director and the producer look for someone who can give them what they want and if you can, they don't ask for anything more. Doing it 48 times is an altogether different discipline. It's nice to be able to add layers to a character, which you can when you're a regular.

"Maybe LaCroix mellowed when he was dead. He's less antagonistic toward Nick now. He has become more of a mentor, more of an advisor, and there are moments in the new episodes where he helps Nick and Nick actually says, 'Thank you.' It's amazing; they behave like normal people, which is nice. That sort of development is good. There's really no danger of losing the show's dramatic tension, though, so long as Nick is trying to become human -- and he is, all the time. This is simply a different tack that LaCroix is using and if it doesn't work, watch out. He'll go God knows where. He could kill Nick like that, no problem, if he wanted to, but he doesn't. We just hope LaCroix doesn't run out of patience. That would be the end of the series."

Despite changes in the show, Bennett, like his vampire co-star, has run up against a major problem of working in series television -- repetition. "You can't just do the same thing over and over again," he insists, "because people would get bored rigid. Geraint has often said, 'What are we doing this week?' and I'll answer, 'I tell you that you can't become human again. I tell you not to be stupid again, you get angry with me again and I show you that you're wrong, again.' They print out a shot list every week with a brief description of each shot. One of the most common titles is, 'LaCroix is depressed again.' "

Bennett laughs. "There is still a bit of that, but many of the latest scripts really have been very inventive." Bennett's vampire role also causes its own particular difficulties. "I don't know that any of us realized it was all going to be nights until about episode six," he confides. "We were all standing around saying, 'There's an awful lot of night shooting in this, isn't there? Oh, no! Forever Night!' So I made a rule that from now on, I don't [audition] for anything with 'night,' or 'dark,' or 'black' in the title.

"The teeth we use break after awhile and they have to replace them. The new teeth we have now are comfortable, but they're very, very sharp. The producers try to get you to say your dialogue with them in because it saves them money if you don't have to record it again afterwards. So, you have to be careful you don't bite your tongue.

"For some reason, the writers write in a very flowery, Old-Worldy way. They don't have to because I play it that way. They always give me these terrible lines to say, real stinkers. For example, when I was in love with Nick's sister in one episode, she says, ‘My heart's breaking, my heart's breaking,' and I say,'Yeah, and it appears to be affecting my insides as well.' Who wrote this garbage?

"If I get sunburned, my makeup girl goes crazy. Red is a very difficult color to hide. Also, when you have sunburn, your skin is actually hotter. The makeup melts off. So, needless to say, I don't sunbathe.

"Besides the contacts in the eyes and the teeth, the biggest aggravation was the wardrobe I had to wear in the summer. You go into a wardrobe fitting in shorts and a T-shirt and they put you in six layers of felt. In one episode, I was standing there in the sun in this Arab burnoose, about four layers, with this dark red leather turban, dying of heat. That drove me crazy.

"I'm 6' 1", but they put me in these snakeskin boots, specially hand-made for me, so I'm about 6' 3" in the show. They pinch my feet because they're so high. As soon as I get back into the trailer, they're off."

Despite all the difficulties, Bennett is quick to point out the pleasures of working on the series. "It's a really happy set," he enthuses, "one of the easiest-going sets I've ever been on. A lot of the crew are the same people who did the first episode three years ago and they love it in the same way that we do. John Kapelos and I haven't worked together until this year, and it's great fun. We had two episodes where we had a lot to do with each other, and John directed episode 25 of the second season. It's the episode that shows where LaCroix came from and how he was brought across [into vampirism] and everything. John's just a lovely guy, crazy, and full of enthusiasm and mischief. Ger and I get on very, very well. We always have. It seems as if I've known him all my life.

"Recently, I saw the episode Geraint directed. Overall, it was an extremely good piece of first-time directing. There were a couple of shots, of me that when he did them, I thought, 'What are you doing, Ger?' but seeing it on the screen was just wonderful. Because he doesn't have any preconceptions about directing, he has gone further than most directors would go. Consequently, the episode is actually more visually exciting than many of the others."

Asked to sum up, Bennett replies with a question of his own. "How can anyone complain when they're doing, this sort of job?" he asks. "You get very well paid for it, you get lots of recognition and job satisfaction. It's wonderful and very good for my career. Presuming that we'll come back next year, which is looking very likely, they've asked me if I'll direct at least one, maybe two. That'll be fun. I'll really put my neck on the chopping block.

"My sons saw the first three episodes of the second season. They thought it was pretty stupid. That really brings it down to Earth. The third episode, 'Bad Blood,' I had to turn it off. My three-year-old had gone to bed and my eight-year-old was watching it, curled up in a fetal position at the end of the sofa. He said, 'Daddy, turn this off; it's scary.' So, I haven't shown them any more. The show definitely works with eight-year-olds."

Fortunately for Bennett, most of Forever Knight's audience are older than eight, and eager to meet him in person. "A convention slut is what I am now," he confesses, chuckling. "We're all indebted to the fans and I feel it's my way of paying them back. It's great to get feedback. I like the astonishing fact that people in ordinary jobs are willing to spend their hard-earned money to see me. I love the art shows, vendors' rooms and all those sorts of things. It's not a holiday, though. I come home tired at the end of a weekend because I like to do as much as I can and make myself available all the time, but I'm happy to do it."

So, after the ups and downs of Forever Knight, what does Bennett remember about it all? "The last episode is what springs to mind immediately," he enthuses. "It involved the destruction of Pompeii by Mount Vesuvius. They built this astonishing set, a Roman whorehouse basically, with pillars and paintings and a swimming pool with people in it in the middle. They had it rigged so they could pull levers and it would all collapse. Then, there was my first kiss as a vampire, which was earlier this season as well: LaCroix in love. He was much younger then and he really fell head over heels for a mortal, Nick's sister, which was weird. He was devastated to have to leave her. There are other lovely moments too.

"Almost no one here in Canada knows about the show, which is really ridiculous and sometimes a source of some irritation on the set. We've done 48 episodes and it's totally Canadian. In the United States, it's so big now that people recognize me in airports, on the streets and in all sorts of places. Here, nobody knows anything about it. Absurd!