Surfin' USA

THE Emmy and Golden Globe-winning star of TV police series The Shield, Michael Chiklis, thought that playing one of the Fantastic Four superheroes on screen "would be a breeze". But it turned out to be playing one of the greatest acting challenges of his career.

You may wonder what's difficult about playing a pile of rocks. The body of his character Ben Grimm was transformed into an orange-coloured rock by cosmic bombardment, resulting in the actor spending most of the first Fantastic Four movie as The Thing inside a rock suit with his face and body concealed. And that, he discovered, makes it difficult to act.

For the second film, Rise Of The Silver Surfer, his body suit underwent a huge redesign. The figures speak for themselves - on the first film, it took three-and-a-half hours to get his head and face on, then an hour to get the body on, while on the new one, it was 90 minutes for the face and seven minutes for the body.

"It made a big difference. I could actually get to know these guys and talk to people," says Chiklis who previously spent most of his downtime in the make-up trailer.

"I had to tap into some of the old theatre training, harking back to the Greek theatre training with masks. It really is very difficult. I did something I don't normally do, something we all avoid like the plague, and that's mirror acting.

"You always play characters from the inside, you want to have the emotional side of the character alive and well. In the first film, I found that a lot of people thought I was angry because I'd be sitting there with this scowl built on my face. People would come up to me and say, 'are you all right?'.

"I found I needed to spend some time in front of the mirror and literally see how I could project certain emotions while dressed as The Thing. And it really was a challenge, I'd never worked so technically before. I found it to be one of the triumphs of my life that I was able to do it."

As a result, The Thing in the second movie is closer to the comic book original and shows his funny side. Chiklis himself was fascinated by the whole process of making a special effects heavy movie and the fact that anything writers dream up can be realised on screen these days.

"A lot of this was like being at film school," he says. "I would be on the set when I wasn't working, stand way back and watch the guys from the special effects team and the director Tim Story working on sequences I wasn't involved in, just for the experience."

He's got used to children shouting out The Thing's catchphrase, "It's clobbering time" in the street and to having an action figure based on the character. "Speaking as a father, I have to say it's the greatest thing in the world," says Chiklis. "I'm the greatest dad at school. I go to my kids' school and have kids come running up to me. I was walking down the street at Hallowe'en with my wife and children and, all of a sudden, I hear my voice say, 'It's clobbering time'. I turn around and a ten-year-old kid with the whole Thing regalia is standing there with big hands that when you hit them together my voice comes out. I looked at him and he looked at me."

IOAN Gruffudd, who plays elastic man Reed Richards, reckons the makers have got his Fantastic Four doll exactly right. "If you turn the doll in profile, it has my big nose," he says.

Chris Evans, alias Johnny Storm the human torch, is pleased with his doll too. "My mother has every single toy from this movie. You walk in and it's like a toy store. It's weird," he says. Jessica Alba, who plays invisible woman Sue Storm, says her family love all the merchandise too. "I have a lot of cousins and they all collect the dolls. It's completely surreal," she says.

Evans spent a day in a Thing-like costume after his Human Torch takes on Grimm's rock-like qualities. That was quite enough for him, giving him a huge appreciation for what Chiklis goes through. One of his scenes requires him to emerge from a shower in just a towel. He looks as though he worked out in preparation. "This is permanent stuff my kids are going to see, so you don't want to look like a wet noodle," he says. "I like to exercise regularly anyway. I feel better mentally, feel better physically after a workout, so it's something I would do regardless."

This is the second time this year he's saved the world, after appearing in Danny Boyle's space thriller Sunshine. On that mission, he was aboard a spaceship attempting to stop the sun destroying the Earth. Fantastic Four and Sunshine were very different experiences.

{THE major difference was the budget," says Evans. "The approach regards acting is the same - acting's acting. Whether it's a Reebok commercial or Schindler's List, the approach is the same.

"But the pace of film-making, the environment, is drastically affected by the budget. If you have deep pockets you can take your time, experiment a little bit. The general vibe on set is much more light-hearted, you're not always checking the clock.

"Sunshine was a bit more of a crush. You have to map out your blueprint before you go to work every day because you have fewer takes, limited time and it's a little bit more rushed. Fantastic Four felt like summer camp."

Much of the time the cast are acting in a void, performing to no one and nothing against a green screen with the background and effects to be added later. "It's difficult because there's nothing tangible to play off. You have to get on the same page with the director and special effects supervisors to know what's happening around you. Because, even if you can tap into your imagination and commit to the silliness of what you're doing, you still have to know what it's going to look like in the end."

There's also the reaction of fans to consider. He finds it great to have not only little kids but 70-year-old men coming up and saying they loved the comic books as children. "That's when you process what a major part of the pop culture and how iconic these characters are," he says.

* Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer (PG) opens in cinemas tomorrow.