Arms and the men

ALFRED Molina has no problems being the bad guy. And he welcomes Hollywood's habit of casting Brits as the villain of the piece. "It's very remunerative," he laughs. The London-born actor was back home for this week's UK premiere of Spider-Man 2 in which he plays - that's right - the baddie, a scientist who ends up with four giant tentacles welded to his body following a lab accident.

Hardly surprisingly, Dr Otto Octavius turns nasty and Spider-Man needs all his special powers to cope with Doc Ock as he becomes known.

Since making his movie debut in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Molina's screen appearances have included Letter To Brezhnev, Boogie Nights, Prick Up Your Ears and Frida. He's now based in the US, where he lives with actress wife Jill Gascoigne and their daughter Rachel.

He's happy to join the long list of British actors cast as bad guys by Tinseltown. "It's a long tradition," he says. "In the early days of Hollywood you had Basil Rathbone and Claude Rains, and then later on the next generation you had James Mason.

"But they all played their villains with English accents. There was something about the accent that appealed to American audiences. There was a certain style of playing those bad guys - they were always rather suave and urbane, or ladies' men, slightly sardonic, witty and cruel in a very casual way.

"In more recent years, even though British actors have played those parts, they've started widening in terms of ethnicity. Alan Rickman was German in Die Hard, Gary Oldman's played a lot of villains and he's been every nationality under the sun.

"Doc Ock is, to all intents and purposes, American. So that's changed. I used to make a joke that the reason British actors always played villains is because we're cheaper. They could hire us for a quarter of what they'd have to pay an American actor. But, like all jokes, there's always a grain of truth in it. I was very pleased to be part of that tradition."

An added bonus of being in Spider-Man 2 was that he was a comic book fan as a youngster. He recalls an English comic strip featuring a character called Alf Tupper, who worked in a chip shop during the day and was an amateur athlete at night. "He never had any money, so he ran in borrowed shoes, tatty old vest and shorts. He was always running against some glamorous bloke who'd be in the Olympic team, but he always won - and never got out of the chip shop," he says.

Young Alfred began getting into American comics when his merchant sailor dad brought them back from his travels. That sparked his interest, although he remembers them being quite expensive when they started being sold in this country.

"I didn't get them regularly. I must have been 12 or 13 when I started getting pocket money on a regular basis and started lashing out on Marvel and DC comics," he says. "The Marvel comics were harder to find, but so much more glamorous. It must have been the artwork. The way New York was drawn was quite exotic. There was something sexy about that."

He always fancied being the Silver Surfer or Thor. Instead, he's happy to settle for Doc Ock, despite having to manipulate four heavy tentacles. He had a lot of fun working with the puppeteers who operated them, spending two months rehearsing with the puppeteer team.

"We had to learn a sort of vocabulary of moves, because for all the scenes where the tentacles were strapped on to me, they didn't afford very much movement," he explains. "All the movement had to be choreographed. I couldn't improvise, suddenly decide to turn around or stand up."

He doesn't remember the character from the comics, but gathers he went through various different looks and changes while remaining one of the most popular of all the villains.

Molina thinks there's something very human about Doc Ock. "He's not like a fantasy villain, he hasn't come out of the sea or from another planet. He's very much one of us. Maybe that's been part of the attraction," he says.

"That makes it more interesting to play. There's a development in the character, where he's not relentlessly evil. It's not like you hear about the bad guy in the first 20 minutes of the movie and suddenly he arrives snarling and screaming."

Unlike some actors, he's always been fascinated by the technical side of film-making and playing Doc Ock gave him the chance to experience it first-hand. Effects-filled films like Spider-Man 2 are what he calls "feats of technology". "It's not like doing a movie where the bulk of the action is people having conversations over dinner, walking through parks," he says.

"Gary Cooper was a brilliantly technically accomplished actor. From all accounts, he used to love that side of it. He'd have to arrive and be lit just here, just a profile, and he always hit the mark.

"There's something really interesting in conquering the technology so you can find yourself hopefully using it, rather than it using you, or being dictated to. I take a certain amount of pride in that."

The physical demands of carrying those tentacles meant Molina needed to be fit. He worked out beforehand, not to develop a six-pack but to lose the weight he'd put on for his role in Frida.

Director Sam Raimi favoured a 1950s bodybuilder look for Doc Ock. "He didn't want me to look lean and chiselled. For him, that was a terribly modern look and Spidey's got that. He doesn't need the villain to look like that - thank goodness, speaking as one of nature's big boys."

* Spider-Man 2 (PG) opens in cinemas today

Spinning success

THERE'S a moment in Spider-Man 2 when the webbed wonder's alter ego Peter Parker finds his superpowers are fading. After a leap from a building, he falls flat on his face and gets up rubbing his bruised body, moaning "My back, my back!".

The in-joke won't be lost on those who've followed the story of bringing the sequel to the screen. At one point, an old back injury looked like keeping Tobey Maguire from reprising the role.

In the end, he did don mask and cape again but director Sam Raimi couldn't resist putting in the joke. He asked Maguire first, to make sure he didn't mind. "He said, 'Yes, that's okay, let them laugh at me'. He was a good sport about it," says Rami.

Maguire pocketed $17m for playing Spider-Man again.

The sequel sees Peter Parker in an emotional state as he tries to come to terms with superpowers which he views as both a gift and a curse.

The actor says he felt his character's pain. "Being Spider-Man and not having a life of his own is wearing on him. It's causing him so much personnel inner turmoil and pain that his system is rejecting it. He's constantly racked with feelings of guilt," he says.

He did a lot of his own stunt work - without injury - that required him to undertake a workout routine of up to four hours a day, six days a week to prepare.

"There's just certain things that I have to do and I also want to do because you're bringing life into the character.

"It's a very physical movie. I love how director Sam Raimi loves to torture Peter Parker."

Perhaps the fact that Maguire is so good at playing conflicted misfits stems from his own rootless upbringing. His parents split up when he was two, with young Tobey and his mother ending up living with various relatives along America's West Coast. "I lived in a lot of different homes and I'm sure it affects my character quite a bit," he admits.

"I think I was really over being a kid by 15.".

Dropping out of high school, he turning to acting and got into films through commercials and s mall TV roles.

"It's strange to start your acting career so young, but I always had this faith that I'd make it. It definitely gave me another form of education."

He now lives in a $3.5m mansion in Beverly Hills - courtesy of his first Spider-Man payday - and has learnt to live with being a celebrity. "I pretty much try and not pay attention to it. I don't particularly like that side of it, but it is what it is. It's nothing I can't handle. You just don't let it affect your life in any kind of negative way."

Next up for Maguire could be another troubled soul Electroboy, about a manic depressive who tries electro-shock therapy.

He's already committed to a third Spider-Man, due for release in 2007, that could net him a $20m payday.

But he would like a change from playing a buffed-up superhero.

"I'd definitely like to do a film where I didn't have to work out four hours a day," he says.

Published: 15/07/2004