Hellboy II: The Golden Army 地獄怪客2:金甲軍團

“I get chills up my spine thinking about my first reaction to the emotional world that Guillermo explores,” Perlman said. “... I have trouble capturing his true genius. Because it’s so unique and so much unlike what anybody else is grappling with, in any form of culture. You see Guillermo continuing to use kind of the same set pieces and grapple with what is truly monstrous, and it always has this juxtaposition of the conventional human versus the conventional creature/monster — and what is truly monstrous.”

At 58, Perlman is, to be sure, the summer’s most unusual comic-book action star, amid a season in which Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man, and the combo platter of Christian Bale and the late Heath Ledger are the stars of “The Dark Knight,” due later this month.

He is, by contrast, a child of New York in the 1950s who at 14 had already reached 6-foot-2 and weighed 290 pounds, he said. “A big, fat, gawky kid,” he recalled, who would later flunk the physical required to get into Lehman College.

That feeling of outsider-ness no doubt contributed to his fast friendship with del Toro, a comic-book aficionado who waited out seven years of studio skepticism about the idea of Perlman as the “Hellboy” lead, taking development meetings with a clay sculpture of Perlman as the character.

The two first met in the early ‘90s, when del Toro, then a fledgling horror director with a costume-effects business in Mexico City, sent Perlman a flattering letter, hoping he would agree to be in his first film, the 1993 low-budget and creepy “Cronos.” (The director had seen the actor while studying the makeup in “Quest for Fire” and “Beauty and the Beast.”) Del Toro’s letter happened to catch Perlman at one of a series of fallow points in his career, when he was wondering if he should leave Los Angeles and move his family back to New York.

Over lunch, Perlman talked philosophically of times when he was overextended on credit cards, of painting his house to unload it. His words hinted at a thicket of struggle and self-recrimination — a feeling, Perlman noted, that lends itself to doing “Hellboy.”

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