WORDS LIKE ‘UNDERRATED’, ‘unheralded’, and ‘overlooked’ tend to attach themselves to Doug Jones like velcro. As a man who’s spent a lifetime buried under various layers of makeup and prosthetics in films like Hellboy, Batman Returns, The Shape of Water, and Hocus Pocus, Jones is used to sharing the spotlight with the extraordinary people who make him look unreal. Now, however, he’s ready to tear off the rubber and show the world his real face. “If the creature/monster comes along that sings to me, I’ll never say never,” he tells Men’s Health. “But I’m focusing more on my human characters.”
It’s become a cliché through the many years of his career to say that Jones is the most famous actor you’ve never heard of. But the actor’s filmography is remarkable. Since he started working in the industry in the late ‘80s, he’s starred in about 90 films and short films, making an indelible impression as the man Hollywood calls when it’s casting ‘tall mutant’ or ‘unsettling alien.’ If performers like Andy Serkis have been able to become stars from creature work, it’s in part because they’re standing on Jones’s shoulders–a vertiginous position indeed.
But it’s not just Jones’s body of work that’s remarkable—it’s his body itself. The 64-year-old, who describes himself as an ectomorph (i.e. tall, and skinny for his height), is 6’3”, and has been long and thin his entire life. He’s the youngest of four brothers, all of whom were also tall and slim. “But I was by far the skinniest,” he says. “I looked emaciated compared to them.” One brother went to college on a basketball scholarship, and the other two went on track and field scholarships. As Jones puts it, “I went to college on my own.”
The actor says he lived in the shadow of his brothers; his dad was a military man who valued physical strength. “I had no idea what the purpose of me was,” Jones says. Kids made fun of him for his build, and his brothers were able to pin him down, rendering him defenseless. At school, he would be called an ostrich or a giraffe. “So I kind of carried around a self-hatred,” he says. “I hated how I looked, and I had no idea that being a rather thin person could be a very healthy thing later in your life.”
Watching goofy people on TV became a refuge for him, and he realized that it might just be possible to put his unique configuration of physical characteristics to good use in Hollywood. This led first to TV and commercials, then to working with heavyweights like Guillermo del Toro. This, of course, is a story that Jones has told many times before. It’s a great story.
There’s no sign of childhood bullying when you speak to Jones. He’s a sheer delight in conversation, talking fluently and with passion and generosity about his peers, the media, and the fans. We should all wish to have as much energy at his age. He can still put one leg behind his head–a party trick of old. For how much longer will he be able to do it? “That’s between God and my body,” he says.
Creature effects people in Los Angeles had been telling Jones for a while that he was wonderful, but these compliments tended to bounce off him. But it was only when he was working on an episode of The X-Files that he remembers his opinion of his own body changing. The late John Vulich, special effects makeup artist on the show, walked around Jones, studying him from every angle. Finally, Vulich said, “Has anyone ever told you what a beautiful neck you have?”
No one had shared this with Jones before. “That made my brain go woooooooop,” he says, pretending to spin it 180 degrees. He realized that where some saw flaws, others might see beauty–and, perhaps, that ostriches and giraffes are gorgeous in their own way too.
Even at his heaviest–in college, where food was infinite and he wanted to bulk up–Jones only weighed 155 pounds. He used to use dumbbells that weighed as much as 30 pounds, but now he sticks to 15 pounds in each hand. He used to work out ahead of a job, afraid he wouldn’t otherwise be able to pull it off.
Now, he says, his motivation is different: “My fear is that I won’t be able to move, or get myself out of a chair, or in and out of a car–that’s a better motivation, actually.”
For what Jones calls his “skinny boy workout”–weights on Monday; cardio on Wednesday; weights on Friday–he works with personal trainer Steve Atlas, with whom he has online check-ins and the very occasional intensive workout weekend. “He’s so keen to help me be the best, strongest skinny that I can be,” Jones says in an email specifically sent to ensure Atlas gets recognition.
Another man to whom Jones owes a great deal is Guillermo del Toro, whom he met in 1997 when filming Mimic, playing a human-sized insect. While chatting with del Toro–whom Jones initially thought must have been a fanboy, not the director of the actual film–the actor gave him a business card he’d designed himself, with his phone number resting on the lip of his illustrated face. Five years later, when the maquette for Hellboy’s amphibious humanoid Abe Sapien was unveiled to del Toro (“You are so beautiful,” said the director, falling to his knees, “and I am so fat”), del Toro still had the business card. He called Jones. Jones said ‘Yes’ (he says ‘Yes’ to everything). A career-defining partnership was born.
Jones’s latest project has enabled him to play a monster he long dreamed of portraying: a vampire. It’s a reimagining of the 1922 silent film Nosferatu, directed by David Lee Fisher, in which Jones assumes the title role. “I thought I was never sexy enough to be a Dracula and never young and pretty enough to be a sparkly one from Twilight,” Jones says, with typical self-deprecation. “But Nosferatu being scraggly, pointy-eared, buck-toothed, kinda ugly–that I’ve got.”
To say that this film has been long overdue would be an understatement. Fisher’s project began principal photography in 2015, and has involved constant work in the intervening years. A labor of love, it’s an essentially a remake of the Max Schreck version, in which precisely the same scenes play out, but new dialogue is added, and digital versions of the original backdrops are employed with the help of copious amounts of green screen and digital effects. This was the same technique Fisher used when he worked with Jones on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 2005.
The film may be one of the last in which Jones is near-unrecognizable. Is he at all irritated that he’s been so synonymous with anonymity over the years? That people might remember the monsters more than the man? “I’m not frustrated or annoyed at all by that, to be honest with you. Monsters have been very good to me over the years, and the audience for them has been very good to me over the years,” he says. “As far as actors go, I’m one actor under lots of rubber bits who’s gotten an awful lot of press.”
Stream Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror Here
