‘As Long as I’m Covered in Rubber, No One Will Know I’m Pissing My Pants’ — 75-Year-Old Ron Perlman Says He’s Still Ready to Do Hellboy 3

Ron Perlman has said he is still very interested in reprising his iconic role as Hellboy for Hellboy 3 and finishing Guillermo del Toro’s much-loved superhero trilogy — despite being 75 years old.

Perlman hit the big time with his starring role as Hellboy in both 2004’s Hellboy and its sequel, 2008’s Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. And while he is a frequent collaborator with director Guillermo del Toro on the likes of Pacific Rim, Nightmare Alley, and Pinocchio, Hellboy 3 has failed to materialize in the near 20 years since Hellboy 2 came out.

However, Perlman still sounds very much up playing Hellboy once again, and even said he’d do it aged 80! In an interview with GQ to coincide with his cameo in Amazon’s ongoing Fallout TV series, Perlman said he’s waiting and ready.

“F**k yeah,” he said. “I mean, I was asked to do the one with David Harbour. But the only Hellboy I’m interested in doing is Hellboy 3 — finishing the trilogy we started with del Toro and the original crew. It can’t be jobbed out. You know, call me in five years if we haven’t made Hellboy 3 yet and ask me if I’m ready at 80. And I’ll go, ‘Yeah, alright. As long as I’m covered in rubber, no one will know I’m pissing my pants.’”

The David Harbour Hellboy Perlman refers to here is 2019’s reboot, directed by Neil Marshall. Harbour, of Stranger Things fame, plays Hellboy, with Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane, Sasha Lane, Daniel Dae Kim, and Thomas Haden Church also starring. Perlman refused to return without del Toro’s involvement. Harbour’s Hellboy ended up a critical and commercial flop, and bombed at the box office, making just $55 million worldwide.

A third iteration, the R-rated, folk horror Hellboy: The Crooked Man starring Jack Kesy, skipped a theatrical release altogether in favor of a digital debut in 2024. It, too, failed to make a splash.

While leaves us with the unlikely prospect of getting the original band back together for Hellboy 3. Speaking recently on the Joe Vulpis Podcast, Perlman said Hellboy 3 was never close to happening. But why? “People moved on,” Perlman replied in typically short fashion. Who had moved on? “Some of the creatives.”

Then: “I thought we owed it to the fans. I still do. I’ll do it now at 75-years-old, if the right person came along and says, ‘Okay.’ Because it was meant to be a trilogy, right? At the end of the second one, she’s pregnant with twins and he still hasn’t either destroyed the earth or saved the earth, which is his oracle.

“The third movie was going to have all that in it. It was going to be the resolve. And I thought that if you invited the fans to participate in one and two and not give them three, you were performing some sort of a… what is it called in legal circles? It should have happened.”

Perlman went on to say that Guillermo del Toro “knew what the third movie was going to look like.”

“It would have been epic,” he said. “That’s why it was a shame. And it turns out people really dug the two Hellboy movies. We didn’t make Marvel money. So, it wasn’t like one of these mandates where we had to… you know, like all these movies now where they have to make one after another because they’re making a billion dollars every time they… we didn’t do that. So, there was never a mandate.

“But it turns out that when you go back and make a list of comic book movies, Hellboy always comes up pretty pretty good.”

In 2024, Hellboy creator Mike Mignola said it was highly unlikely that Guillermo del Toro would finish his Hellboy trilogy. “I just can’t see him coming back to doing Hellboy again,” Mignola told Forbes. “He’s got so many other things he’s always wanted to do. It’s a shame [the trilogy] didn’t get finished, but I just don’t think it was ever really going to happen. It was kind of a dream thing, but I don’t think it was ever realistic. From what I understand, it would have been amazingly expensive, following up two movies that didn’t make money.”

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.