Michael Biehn Interview

Mike: Thanks. Great to be here.

Mark & Brian: First and foremost, saw the videotape, as I was telling you in the hallway, videotape of the show. You are currently starring in “The Magnificent Seven”. The theme for the show, is that the original “Magnificent Seven” theme?

Mike: Yes. Yes. It’s the theme to the original film and I think for a long time it was the theme for the Marbolo cigarrettes.

Mark & Brian:Da, da, da (starts humming the theme). That’s where I’ve heard it! I kept thinking that it’s “Wagon Train” or “Have Gun, Will Travel” but no its the Marbolo theme. Have you ever seen the movie? The original “Magnificent Seven”?
I haven’t.
(Tim Allen grunting and growling) That’s pure testosterone. Now ladies, this show is really for you, whether you know it or not. You’ve got seven men, all of them gorgeous but different. Each one has a different thing. You’ve got Michael here, dressed to the nines. Tight pants. A perky ass this fellow’s got going.

Mike: That’s kinda of my “Wild, Wild West” look. When I was a kid, I grew up watching Robert Conrad in “Wild, Wild West” and when I got on the show I said I wanna look like Robert Conrad.

Mark & Brian: Well, you do. The casting call, “Where’s that perky ass guy?” It is going on.

Mike: I get a lot of jobs that way.

Mark & Brian: “Where’s that perky ass I guy, I want to see him.” Then you got the other guy who is rough, but tumble. Good-looking but no necessary talent. Then you got the one guy who’s-

Mike: ‘No necessary talent.’ Which one is that? I want to tell him that you said that.

Mark & Brian: Dale Midkiff. He just seems to be a drifter-

Mike: He’s the ladies’ man. He’s suppose to be the ladies’ man. Dale. He plays Buck.

Mark & Brian: Well he doesn’t have a perky ass. (laughter) Now you know who is good. Is the guy who was the “Beauty and the Beast”.

Mike: Ron Perlman is on the show.

Mark & Brian: Excellent.

Mike: Ron is in another movie I saw in the paper today. He was in “Aliens 4”. He’s a great actor and has been around a long time. Remember the famous film, “Quest for Fire”? Where he grabs Rae Dawn Chong on the beach-

Mark & Brian: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you saying that was him?

Mike: Yeah, that was Ron Perlman.

Mark & Brian: That changes my life! I loved that movie! And he-

Mike: One of my favorite scenes in film is where he grabs Rae Dawn and uhhh, uhhh!

Mark & Brian: Or before where he smelled it.

Mike: That’s right.

(laughter)

Mark & Brian: And that whole scenario has taught us that things haven’t changed as far as our sexual uh... No they haven’t. That’s me uhhh huuh.

(laughter)

Mark & Brian: Michael, in promotion and the fact that you were going to be on the show, the last few days. Yeah he’s the guy who made this. Yeah he’s the guy who made this. And then everybody is calling up and saying, ‘No, but he was in this. And he was in this.’ How many movies. We’ve counted here and there are about 192 movies. How many movies have you starred in or was in the supporting cast in?

Mike: Do you have another copy of that.

Mark & Brian: Sure man, here. Give it to your mom.

Mike: There are some good ones here. I see you’ve circled a few things. “Grease”, that was the very first film I ever did. I was basically a glorified extra in “Grease”. But if you look real hard in the basketball sequence where John Travolta is trying to learn basketball to impress Olivia Newton-John, I’m the guy who gets punched in the stomach. There’s also a quick shot of me in a letter’s sweater where John Travolta is stuffing a frog down somebody’s top. I look awfully young in that.

Mark & Brian: The other one I have circled is where you play John Holmes?

Mike: You know I haven’t done that. That was announced by the company that wanted to make that and that’s in pre- pre-production so we haven’t done that yet. Yeah, its not green-lit, but I think we’re going to do that soon. I like the John Holmes role because it would take place after his porno and it basically what happens at the ????? Canyon where he was involved in breaking into houses and stealing drugs and he gets stole from the wrong guys and he and about six or seven guys, well, get involved in a death up at ???? (Royal?) Canyon, it’s the second most famous brutal murder after the Manson killings and he was caught but would never testify in court and was put into jail for contempt of court. But he wouldn’t testify on the killings. He’s a pretty interesting character.

Mark & Brian: Well also, it’s obvious you would be the choice because you have quite the package. And that’s pretty well known around Hollywood.

Mike: Well, that goes without saying.

(laughter)

Mark & Brian: Get that guy with quite the package! Looking at this movie list you’ve been in. “Terminator 2”.

Mike: “Terminator” is really the movie I starred in. “Terminator 2”, I actually wasn’t in the movie. I was in the laserdisc version.

Mark & Brian: But it was a great role for you in “Terminator”. But “Tombstone-”. That’s the one! That’s a great film. “I want you lunger!” I love movies and I watch them all the time. We have movie trivia here. When Mark told me that you were in “Tombstone” , I couldn’t believe that it was you! That had to be a fun movie to make.

Mike: It was a great movie to make, because of erm...all the people that were in it. Sam Elliot, Bill Paxton, Kurt Russel - who's a great, great guy. Val Kilmer, erm....Powers Boothe, Stephen Lake, Billy Bob Thornton....

Mark & Brian: Dana Delaney

Mike: ..Jason Priestly...I mean, the list goes on and on! So, every morning you'd wake up and go to breakfast and hang out with all these people. It was a great fun and the costumes in that were also very great. I played Johnny Ringo as very dark. And mean. And half an alcoholic. You know, it was really a lot of fun. I’m not that way. I’m really laid back and I’m blonde and cool or whatever, but that character was a very, very sick guy and for some reason really attractive to women on this show, they just want to change him or something.

Mark & Brian: But what’s also unique about that character was that he was intelligent. He was the above-average bad guy with a high IQ. Or at least you played him that way.

Mike: Well he spoke Latin for one thing. Johnny Ringo was supposedly well read. He read a lot of Shakespeare. I’m not sure how big of a gunfighter Johnny Ringo was, there really isn’t. There was the time he called down Wyatt Earp down in the street. That really happened and there were a few other things, but he wasn’t really like Wyatt Earp. He was a fun character and Kurt is a great guy.

Mark & Brian: We had Kurt on several times and we kept saying, “Kurt, oh my God, ‘Tombstone’, the greatest.” And his take on it was, it was okay, but you should have seen the original script.

Mike: Well, that’s true.

Mark & Brian: What happened? Because the one that we got was killer.

Mike: Yeah. To give you an idea, what happened there is that that situation was not as white and black as good guys and bad guys. The Earps against the Cowboys. You know, the Cowboys were there first, it was sort of their town until the Earps showed up. After the shootout at the OK’d Corral, a lot of people felt that the Earps just went that there loaded for bear and blew these guys away at the Ok’d Corral. Who all just had little six-shooters and they had shot guns. And the Earps actually went on trial for murder and there was a big murder trial that took place after those killings and it was like the Rodney King trial here. Half the city, or half the country felt one way and the other felt another way.

Mark & Brian: Was that in the original script.

Mike: Yes. And there was more about the Cowboys and who they were. And it was a much grayer story, it wasn’t just a story about good guys and bad guys. It was fuller. It would have been much longer and would have been more of an epic. So there are a lot of things about it. I just found it was a much grayer story and a much more interesting and there are much more characters. A lot of people got cut. Powers Boothe got cut way down. My character got cut down.

Mark & Brian: Kurt alluded to some director problems too.

Mike: Well, the director was replaced after four weeks. And Kurt Russell, I have to tell you, I have a lot of respect for him. He’s not only a great guy to work with, but he kinda took over as a producer along with Jim Jackson and they had to. We had shot four weeks and we had to quit shooting and they were going to shut the whole thing down and they had like a 135 page script and they said we’ll just have to cut a bunch of stuff out of it and go ahead and make what we can because we can’t use the four weeks we shot. We basically shot it in 8 weeks instead of 12. Everything that you see was only 2/3 of the original schedule so they had to just cut pages out of the script so they just had to cut and cut and cut.

Mark & Brian: Well, what you wound up with and I don’t think I’ve met a person yet who has seen it and didn’t love it.

Mike: I agree. And I’m working on this show, “The Magnificent Seven”, and there are a lot of guys on that show who are western guys who worked with John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. All the horse guys and stunt guys and they all say it’s one of their favorite movies.

Mark & Brian: The TV show that Michael is in here to talk about, it’s on tonight, 9 o’clock?

Mike: Yeah, 9 o’clock on CBS.

Mark & Brian: It's a good show. If you love westerns, it’s an absolute no-brainer, don’t miss it. But if you’ve never seen, in fact, how long has it been since a western has been on television on a weekly basis?

Mike: I don’t know. I think there was a show called “Young Guns” that was on for a while.

Mark & Brian: Spinoff from a movie?

Mike: Yes, spinoff from a movie. I think that was on for a while. It’s been quite a while. You know, some people consider “Dr. Quinn” or “Little House on the Prarie” as a western. This goes back to the old days of “Gunsmoke” and “The Rifleman”, things I grew up with, “Bonanza”.

Mark & Brian: Is this your first time on television on a series?

Mike: You know, I actually did a television series, I’ve been around for a long time. I did a series back in 1976 with Robert Reed called “The Runaways” and some guy was taking care of them and it was about the stories of these runaway kids.

Mark & Brian: Are you enjoying it with the TV schedule.

Mike: I love it. I love it. I absolutely love it.

Mark & Brian: You’re a dad with three boys.

Mike: That’s right.

Mark & Brian: So you get to spend more time with your family?

Mike: We shoot it here in LA which is fabulous and also I’m really proud of the show. For a long time I didn’t think I wanted to do television because you have to do it so fast so sometimes the quality isn’t as good as some of the films you work on. But I really am proud of the show and because there are seven of us along with Laurie Holden, the girl on the show.

Mark & Brian: Is that the girl in the bar?

Mike: No, that’s Inez. Laurie plays the blonde. Yeah I know.

Mark & Brian: Yeah, Inez. South of the border. Oh man, wearing those down on the shoulder shirts with the frilly things. Unfortunately though, they did cut the donkey dancing scene.

Mike: The thing about the show is that there are so many actors working that I’m not in every shot like Don Johnson on “Nash Bridges” who’s in every single shot and working 14 hour days. I’m in late and half days off and so on and so forth. The scripts are good. And I’m also involved sometimes in casting and editing and writing and blocking and I think I’ll get a chance to direct.

Mark & Brian: See it’s great that you’re proud of it.
So what was it that made you turn from, “I don’t wanna do television, I don’t want to do it.” Did you read the first show, the first script, is that what did it?

Mike: I think, to tell you the truth, it’s kinda odd. The people producing this show is a company called Trilogy and Pen Denshem is a director, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a movie called “Moll Flanders”, but it’s a beautiful, beautiful movie that was done and Pen is a wonderful director who just did a film for TNT called “Houdini” and they produced “Robin Hood” with Kevin Costner and they produced “Backdraft” and they’ve been involved with filmmaking and they really care. And they came to me, I’ve talked to them before about other projects, and they came to me with this. The head of CBS Les Mooneves called me and said, “I want you to do something for CBS.” And I said, you know what, I want to stay in LA because I have a family. You got something in LA that’s an ensemble you know, I might be interested and six months later this came along. To tell you the truth, I thought I do the pilot which was the 2 hour show and I figured it’s very hard to get a show off the ground these days and I figured, and you can also have very good shows that nobody watches. I hear the show that just got cancelled yesterday, “Cupid”, is a really good show.

Mark & Brian: It is a good show.

Mike: But nobody watched it and it’s gone. So I figured I do the pilot, get a nice chunk of money and lo’ and behold, we got picked up for four last year and we were on Saturday nights and then we got picked up for four more. We did good numbers last year and they put us in mid-season and this is like our third or fourth show this year.

Mark & Brian: I love all the good guy stuff. You mess with one of the guys, the six come. And I love it and it’s a good guy, bad guy and it’s rocking. If I was a bad guy, I wouldn’t mess with the good guy. No you wouldn’t because the other six will come. This is important. I mean how hard can that be? Well, them three amigos that came to town, they didn’t learn it! Well, they’re stupid! They got their ass spanked and they got the hell out! That’s what I’m talking about.