BY JAMES VAN HISE
Volume 6 Number 5

Her baptism into the horror cinema was nothing less than anarchic: Melinda Clarke portrayed a zombie in RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3…actually, a carnivorous zombie with a masochistic streak and a partiality for punk fashion. And, exempting her subsequent appearances on sitcoms (e.g. SEINFELD), Clarke’s TV persona hasn’t strayed from the genre. Sample her guest shot on last season’s finale of SLIDERS. And her recurrent “bad girl” role on XENA. But, enough foreshadowing, let’s do the flashback thing—

The youthful thespian admits that her primary influence has been actor John Clarke, a veteran (32 years!) of NBC’s soap opera, DAYS OF OUR LIVES: “He’s also my father. My mother was a ballet dancer, so from the age of four I was dancing and things like that. I grew up doing a lot of musicals—and dance and theater. When I was eighteen, I was taking acting classes in L.A. and I got an agent and started from there.

“I’ve just been plugging along ever since. The first thing I did was a year on DAYS OF OUR LIVES. I went in thinking that nobody knew who I was, that I wasn’t John Clarke’s daughter, and got the role by auditioning and played a very young, innocent girl who became blind and fell in love with a black doctor. it was supposed to be an interracial story, but unfortunately they didn’t go with it. They shied away. It was a bit controversial, I guess. That was back in ’89-’90.”

Supplementing her experience with L.A. theatre, Clarke was hired as a weekly regular for HEAVEN HELP US, an Aaron Spelling series. A modification of the TOPPER sitcom, the premise involved seraphims mending ethical erosion. A precursor to TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL, Spelling’s morality play didn’t deliver the Nielsens; thirteen episodes later, the show was scuttled.

Clarke’s “life-after death” tenure in RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD III, her next assignment, was bereft of theological sophistry and genre stereotype. “It was a lot of fun,” she winks. “It was much more than playing the teenage girl running around screaming from the monster—I got to play the monster. It actually got a B+ in Entertainment Weekly. But that was my one and only horror film. It puts Romeo and Juliet in a ‘Living Dead’ movie.”

Clarke sagely played her ghoul for sympathy. Not unlike the initial installment of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, which lifted Linnea Quigley into the limelight, critics singled-out Clarke; her S&M zombie—ornamentally punctured with shards of metal and glass—turned into the film’s “poster girl.”

Cast as the villainous Velasca in XENA episodes, Clarke ascribes the series’ longevity to “being campy, fun, stuff. I was made aware that kids really enjoy that show. When I was a kid, my favorites were SUPER-FRIENDS, BATMAN and WONDER WOMAN. Now, kids are really into XENA and I thought it was a lot of fun.”

Debuting in “The Quest” episode, Clarke’s character was presumed to be DOA after collapsing on a bed of spikes. But a quick snack of magical ambrosia not only renewed her life, but endowed the siren with super powers.

“Then in my next episode, “A Necessary Evil,” I fall into the lava pit with Callisto. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be able to go back. They asked if I was available for more episodes this summer, but I’m working on a new show so I can’t o back—which is a shame. One of the pluses was shooting in beautiful New Zealand, which truly is God’s country. It’s one of the cleanest places I’ve ever been. Going to public bathrooms is a real treat, actually—they’re very clean. They’re wonderful people there, and they have a wonderful production. I was there for about a month. it would be nice to go back.”

One of the frills was bonding with Hudson Leick, who portrays Callisto: “She’s a sweetheart. I just talked to her the other day. Hudson plays such a creepy character [laughing], but she’s apparently a big favorite and she’s a very good antagonist for Xena. We had a good time and got to fight quite a bit. We had to wear these contacts, and they’re kind of tough because there’s lots of sand and dust in the exterior settings; the particles stick to the lens.”

I broach the SLIDERS episode which Clarke candidly nailed as “a rip-off of THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, specifically the 1977 version which featured Michael York as the hero. But, on the TV series, York was cast as the mad doctor. Came full circle, didn’t he? I played a hybrid—half human/half animal—and look pretty unattractive [laughing].”

Teaser trailers for SPAWN, which surfaced in June ’97, telegraphed the film’s decidedly “film noir” milieu. “I play a classic bad guy—in vinyl,” Clarke proudly related. “The hierarchy goes something like this: Al Simmons is the number one assassin in the organization, and I play the number two assassin. He wants out but we’re not gonna let him out. So we kill him. I’m in about six scenes, with a few lines in each scene. I’m more the vampy femme fatale in the movie…

“I think they wanted the presence of a very strong female, with very vampy costumes, and someone to play off Martin Sheen’s character. She’s very sexy, someone who’s very strong and who uses her femininity as her power. Most of my scenes are with Sheen and Michael Jai White. It’s a nice, little supporting role.”

Pyrotechnics are formulaic in this summer’s fare, and Clarke’s curvy killer is pretty handy with “M-16’s that were modified to look futuristic; I shot two at the same time, which is somewhat unrealistic. For a ‘comic book’ movie, the weaponry looks good but they kept misfiring. Guns that fire blanks have a tendency to do that more often than guns firing real ammunition.”

SPAWN is adapted from artist Todd McFarlane’s comic book, which has been translated into 16 languages and distributed in no less than 40 countries. The saga of Al Simmons, a murdered CIA operative whose pact with the devil prompts his afterlife as Satanic emissary Spawn, has been spun into a TV series (notes critic Ray Richmond, “It’s as dark as anything HBO has attempted in the live-action arena. The very adult animation is surrealistic—the violence is disturbing.”)

If the movie had approximated the surfeit of carnage that’s visible in the comic book and TV series, an NC-17 rating would have been inevitable. The producers have already risked one liberty…

“My character was written for the film,” admitted Clarke. “There was no ‘Jessica Priest’ in the comic book. Originally, the character’s name was Chapel, which is a male character who has his own comic book. So they renamed my character and, staying within that religious thing, they went from Chapel to Priest.

But the demise of her character adheres to the comic book’s carte blanche barbarity: upon impact with a bullet, Ms. Priest collides through a balcony railing, plummets into a free fall and makes a crash landing on a buffet table. “I did a bit of a stunt, where they yank me back off the balcony,” noted Clarke, “—and then I had a double who actually falls to my death. It was very high up so—needless to say—I wasn’t jumping up and down to do it. But these stunt guys are so safe and so professional. They took out the balcony, and fabricated another one with balsa wood and an aluminum railing. I slipped-on a harness and we were ready to shoot…

“Spawn throws me to the ground and picks up a weapon. I say to him, ‘You don’t have the guts,’ and he shoots me and blows me through the balcony. I did that a couple times and they yanked me back, and I landed on a couple pads. That balcony was about 16 feet in the air, but I only actually fell about 5 or 6 feet. They had hoisted the pads up on some sort of hydraulic lift so that they wee just out of the camera frame, and so I landed about 8 feet up in the air. As an actress it’s always exciting, and it’s never really a big deal afterwards, but up until the moment it’s somewhat daunting sometimes.

“The stunt girl actually had to drop about 12 feet. She landed on a table, and then Clown walks up and makes fun of my character. I’m dead at that point, and I think he refers to me as a human taco. That’s something that I think John Leguizamo came up with. John is the actor who plays Clown, Spawn’s nemesis, and he was always coming up with very humorous lines. I really felt for him. Any time an actor has to do a lot of prosthetic makeup, and really alter their physical appearance, is very difficult. It’s hours and hours every day. I always think twice when someone says you’re going to have prosthetics or heavy makeup.

“Anyway, I die on page 45 of the script. My body is put into a cryogenic chamber, I guess, for the sequel—if there is one.”

I was reluctant to probe into Clarke’s Spanish import, the one where she brandishes an appendage called the KILLER TONGUE (FF 5:10). Though the movie—which is marginally sci-fi—has developed cult adoration in Europe, I heard that Clarke just didn’t want to talk about it. Nevertheless, when I alluded to the black humored abstraction, she appeared nonplussed. “The Spanish title [LA LENGUA ASESINA] sounds better than the U.S. translation,” insisted Clarke. “that’s what I tell people. My description of the film? It’s really hard to explain. The director [Alberto Sciamma] is Spanish and he describes himself as a conceptual artist, and this is the best way he knows how to show his art. It’s a very wacky, dark comedy that is absolutely absurd. It’s so hard to explain. When we were shooting it in Spain, and doing a little bit of publicity, we would tell people ‘It’s a musical!’ Robert Englund does a tap dance and I sing, which is a total joke because it’s so hard to explain what the movie is about.

“A meteor hits the Earth and chaos ensues. There’s no rhyme or reason for the meteor, it just happens. My dog eats some of its particles and transforms into a drag queen. My character sprouts a tongue that she doesn’t want. And it’s kind of funny, because I think that a lot of people are interested in it because they think it sounds like a horror film. But it’s not. It’s a comedy. It’s an absurd, dark comedy. Robert Englund plays the chief screw—as chief guard of a convict camp in the desert, he tortures the men. I’m just a girl waiting for my man to get out of the convict camp. I’m not giving you much here but if you see it, you would understand. You can’t really explain the storyline and understand what it’s about. I won a Best Actress Award for it at the Sitges Fantasy Festival. I still haven’t seen the film, so I don’t know what to tell you.”

Clarke is speculating the MPAA will “pass the film with an R-rating. They should use the Spanish title. I mean, everyone keeps firing the same question: ‘KILLER TONGUE!...Is that like KILLER TOMATOES?’ No. It might be that absurd, but it’s much more complex than that.”

The actress has renewed her ties with the TV medium via a regular role on the weekly SOLDIER OF FORTUNE show. The first 22 episodes are already in production for a Fall ’97 premiere; it was Clarke’s commitment to the UPN series that circumvented an opportunity to reprise Velasca in XENA’s third season. SOLDIER is executive produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, whose movie track record includes BEVERLY HILLS COP, CRIMSON TIDE, TOP GUN, DAYS OF THUNDER and DANGEROUS MINDS.

“We’re doing a MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE-type show,” smiled Clarke. “It’s about a secret team of mercenaries who are hired and paid by the government to be secret operatives. It’s going to be a big show, we’re very excited about it. Brad Johnson is the star. I play a character named Margo Vincent who is a sophisticated woman of the world—an intelligence specialist, computer specialist and dialect specialist. It’s a team of four men and one woman. We have to do things like rescue soldiers from Iraq. They’re doing some wonderful things on the show. It’s unlike anything that’s on TV or that’s been on TV.

“One of the selling points is that our technical advisor is a man named Harry Humphries who has been Jerry Bruckheimer’s technical advisor on THE ROCK, G.I. JANE and CON AIR. We’ve been through some extensive training with weapons and hand-to-hand combat, and it’s going to be very realistic. What you obviously see is still TV and still entertainment; but we’re trying to make the show as realistic as possible in the technology, the way the team goes about performing their dynamic entries and the execution of operatives and tactical maneuvers. This will all meld into the show’s p.r. grab. A lot of people say, ‘Well, who cares if it’s realistic or not? Nobody will know.’ But that is one of the selling points, and that’s why I think people will probably tune in.”

Prior to her casting on the series, Clarke was occupied with “a couple of small, independent films but they’re more the artistic kind. One, called CRITICS, is a low budget film but with wonderful dialogue and characters. It’s a dark comedy about theater critics in L.A., which is a joke in itself. It features William Sanderson (NEWHART), Christopher rich (MURPHY BROWN), Tim Wayans and Leslie Mann. My fiancé wrote it, directed and produced it and is also in it. His name is Ernie Mirich. We’re getting married in June.”

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