It’s never easy being possessed by demons, but it’s also no picnic pretending to be either.
“Possession is tricky,” Pierce, a longtime horror fan, tellsEntertainment Weekly.
“Don’t try this at home.
David Hyde Pierce in ‘The Exorcism’.Vertical
You want to draw from that vocabulary.
On the other hand, you also want it not to look like we’ve seen this all before.
So I think that’s the challenge: making it specific.
Russell Crowe in ‘The Exorcism’.Vertical
So what happens happens between us and comes from what the other person’s doing.”
“I thought the script was really cool, and also I wanted to work with Russell.
I think he’s awesome,” he says.
It’s a very simple scene, but it’s a connected scene."
Crowe’s presence as an actor made forming that connection “so easy,” Pierce says.
“He has such a strong sense of reality in a scene that you feel brought along with it.
Sometimes, it can be hard to focus or hard to disregard the cameras in your eyeball.
Not with him because he’s all-encompassing.
I really liked that.”
When he was a little boy, Pierce says, “I just went nuts for classic horror.
I went as the Wolf Man for Halloween.
I was huge into the classic Universal and Hammer horror films.
Not so much sci-fi, and not the contemporary ones, but all the classics I just love.
So that was another thing that drew me to this.
It’s like I had to bathe in those icy waters.”
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When I was a kid, I was very involved.
I had to learn whatever gobbledygook I speak in.
We weren’t doing a lot of Satan-raising in church, but I knew the territory."
In fact, Pierce took inspiration for his role from one of the church’s leaders.
There was another inspiration, though, that he kept close during the production.
I love it."
See Pierce carry on the clerical family tradition inThe Exorcism, in theaters now.
