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General Kael
Patrick Roach
by Rachel Long & Adam Pirani
The world of Willow my be dominated by the over-sized Daikinis, but towering over them all is veteran actor Patrick Roach. At six-and-a-half feet tall, with a 51-inch chest, Roach plays one of the biggest of the big: General Kael, right-hand man to Bavmorda.
In Willow, Roach's third film for George Lucas, the actor takes to horseback riding and sword fighting as one of this epic adventure's foremost villains. To transform Roach into a sufficiently ominous, threatening creature, prosthetic makeup expert Nick Dadman gave Roach a hairpiece and protruding forehead that initially took hours to apply. Recalls Roach, "First time ever, it took a couple of hours, but he got it down to about 45 minutes in the end." Roach performed sans makeup in scenes where General Kael's animal skull helmet was down for battle, obscuring his face.
Those battles, notes Roach, are overwhelming. "I should think they had some of the biggest battle scenes that one will ever see--many, many hundreds of horses. I think they scraped up every horse in New Zealand--unbelievable."
Only one thing stopped Roach from doing all of his own stunts in Willow. "Insurance--they wouldn't let me," he explains. "The horsemaster, Greg Powell, did a lot of stuff for me, and the stuff they wouldn't let me do, Greg mostly did." Roach also credits Powell with improving his riding technique for the equestrian feats the actor was permitted to do. "I became a master horseman in three days. I had ridden a horse before, but Greg Powell got me riding at full gallop, pulling a sword, within a week. We had a great amount of preparation with Greg because he used to have us riding and galloping, and switching horses trying to find a horse to suit us."
Roach did his own swordfights--on the backlot at Britain's Elstree Studios--against Gavan O'Herlihy (as Ark Thaughbaer) and Val Kilmer (as Madmartigan), but the duels weren't easy, he says, especially when they took place during torrential rainstorms. "The fight scenes were quite hard," Roach explains, "because all day long I would be wielding this sword, doing this fight scene from all different angles, and the heavy clothes I was wearing were wringing, soaking wet and they were just getting heavier and heavier. And it's no good changing clothes, because in a minute you were at it again. I had size 15 boots on, which proceeded to fill up with water. It wasn't entirely pleasant, because you stood there in your wet clothes all the time. Quite often, you would be in the studio at 8 a.m. and you would still be there at 8 p.m."
However, battling a damp wardrobe proved to be less of a hazard than dueling with Val Kilmer. "We were really hitting with these swords," Roach explains. "If Valm Kilmer and I didn't have it right, we would have been in trouble. We were on this very narrow bridge at one time, and we do this scene where we switch and move around, and, in actual fact, I was doing so much damage to the immediate set that they said, ''Pat, you're going to have to stop that.' I was hitting the set and it was coming out in chunks, where I was trying to hit him.' "
Roach thrives in such physically demanding roles as that of General Kael, which is why, he claims, he usually wins the part. "The thing is," he says, "these things are very demanding physically, apart from the dialogue one has to deliver anyway. People keep telling me--I don't know how true it is--that there aren't many big guys who can do both. I suppose it must be true to some extent because I keep getting jobs."
If anything gave this "big guy" trouble while shooting Willow, it was a time-consuming little bundle known as baby Elora Danan. While Roach had relatively little contact with this young character, what contact he did have was far from trouble-free. "I spent many, many hours trying to hold the baby in one hand, with a nervous mother two feet away looking on. I had to hold the baby in one had, and the baby used to kick against the arm. And you have to support the baby's head, and hold the baby balanced," Roach recalls. "It was no problem holding the baby, but when it kicked, it would kick off my arm and tilt itself off.
"We spent hours and hours filming it. And we went back and did inserts as well, trying to get that baby to look this way and look that way. The little devil wouldn't do it."
Another time-consuming aspect of filming Willow proved to be reaching some rather inaccessible locations in New Zealand. While helicopters were the transportation of choice for most of the cast and crew, Roach couldn't have been less pleased. He explains, "We were up at dark. We were taken up to the shoot in helicopters. I hate helicopters." So much, in fact, that he tried to avoid them. "The last day of the shoot, I traveled for two hours by car rather than 10 minutes in a helicopter. I said, 'Look, is there room in that car?,' and they said yes. 'I'll come with you.' I just don't like helicopters. They're dangerous bloody things."
Roach, however, admits that choosing such a remote site for Willow was well worth the inconvenience. He remains in awe of New Zealand's immense beauty though initially he couldn't fathom the necessity of such an expensive location. "We could never understand why they took us all the way over to New Zealand. What was the matter with Norway? But once we got there, we could see why. The amount of money they spent, which was phenomenal I would imagine, will be well justified and recouped quite substantially because of how good the film is. The lak scenes were so beautiful. They even cut a lake out once. They put a matte [a special FX technique] over it--because you just get sick of seeing these beautiful lakes. Some of the scenery was magnifico."
So, 45-year-old Roach took advantage of New Zealand's lovely scenery as the backdrop for his own training, a crucial part of his daily physical routine. He claims that he even nearly convinced his executive producer to join in. "George Lucas and I were almost training partners once. In New Zealand, Joanne Whalley and I were training together, and George said he wanted to train. I said, 'Come along, George, I'll point you in the right direction, but you've got to declare yourself in--not to hard-working training, but to the discipline of it.' I told him, 'If you really want to train, OK, that's no problem, we'll get you training, but you've got to mean it. If you mean it, then you're going to get me on your tail every five minutes making you do it.' That's not making him work hard and doing the wrong things in the gym, that's saying, 'Come on, make the effort. Do it.' "
While it's very clear this British wrestler/health club owner means business when it comes to working out, he says he recognizes the enormous commitment it requires. "It's very hard to train when you're working on a movie," Roach admits, "especially for a man like George Lucas, because he's involved in every aspect. He watches the shoots, and he's involved in the preparation and the pre-production. But, having said that, he wanted to do some training, and I said to him, 'Now make your mind up, George,' and he said, 'I think I'll decline.' But we almost became training partners."
Lucas's decision left Roach to concentrate on a fitness routine with Whalley, who plays Sorsha. "Joanne and I used to run together, and we used to do a bit of stretching together, and we got in the gym a couple of times together. Joanne likes to keep fit. We used to run by the side of a lake, and she would do her stretching and I would do what we call free squatting. We used to finish up by running up a big, steep hill. As we got to the top, Joanne always used to scream, 'Aahhhhh,' to try and get there. She used to get to the top OK, but it was a hell of a hill. We enjoyed our training sessions together."
Training is a requisite if Roach is to effectively portray his powerful characters. But, when Pat Roach fights in a movie, he's not just acting; he draws upon his experience with the real thing. "I used to box and wrestle in the fairgrounds many years ago. I have always wrestled professionally, and I taught judo for six years," he explains. "I went away to learn the wrestling profession an a shoestring, and traveled extensively wrestling, merely to survive and to try to learn the business, rather than earn a great deal of money in the early years."
Wrestling led Roach directly to the movies. As he describes, director "Stanley Kubrick gave me my first break in movies, in A Clockwork Orange. I presume he saw me on television, wrestling, and though, 'He would do for a particular character,' and asked for me. I played one of the bouncers in the bar. It was a couple of weeks' work; it was my first, and your first is always the thing you remember. The funny thing is, that to jump into the movie industry with a man like Kubrick was quite a thing to do, and the next thing I did for him, he gave me lines to do. I had never done a line in my life, never been to an acting school. Suddenly, there I am with a script."
Roach credits a contact made while filming Barry Lyndon with his frst role in a Lucasfilm project. "David Tomblin, who was the first assistant director, helped me get the job in Raiders of the Lost Ark," says Roach, who portrayed two of Harrison Ford's opponents in the film (a Sherpa and the German mechanic who meets up with a propeller). "David, who is a very nice guy, has helped me in my career a great deal. I owe a lot to him. Having said that, I'm a very honest person when I work. I work very hard, and I always give my best, and I think he recognized that and he guided me into one or two parts."
Roach's wrestling background proved handy for Raiders, as it did for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Never Say Never Again, Conan the Destroyer and Red Sonja. Having worked relatively closely to Harrison Ford, Roach reveals great admiration for the man who plays his most frequent and persistent adversary, Indiana Jones. "One can imagine that by now, Harrison Ford and I have swapped many hundreds--or thousands--of punches . . . We hit each other so many times. But don't forget it's all bare fists, so if you catch someone, it's knuckles to the jaw, it's quite nasty. And we swapped many a blow for real; and I must say that Harrison Ford is a super star, and a super person, because he never, ever complained."
One the other hand, Ford always gets to beat Roach. Still, the powerhouse actor is ready for a rematch. "There's another sequel coming up, a third Indiana Jones, which, all being well, I might work in, too," says Patrick Roach. "And Harrison Ford will get a chance to kill me for the fourth time in three movies."
Long, Rachel, & Adam Pirani. "General Kael: Patrick Roach." The Official Willow Movie Magazine. Ed. David McDonnell. New York: Jacobs, 1988. 33-35.
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