Something about Ray Wise makes you think he's up to no good.
He's been cast as The Devil in the TV series The Reaper, and as a demon in Charmed. And, of course, he's still best known as Leland Palmer, who killed his daughter Laura (under the influence of a demon named Bob) in David Lynch's Twin Peaks.
So when the producers of a trippy, low-budget Canadian indie called Iodine needed a fishy character to espouse conspiracy theories and boggle the mind of a young man looking for his missing dad in the Northern Ontario bush, who better than Ray Wise?
Welcome back to the woods, Leland Palmer.
"It's probably my face, my eyes, the whole ball of wax," Wise says from his home in Glendale, Calif. "I just have that look that says I'm holding a dark secret. In fact my secrets are out in the open most of the time. My wife thinks I'm a little weird, but I'm just a normal guy.
"But I like to think about dark things, and when I can play a character like that, I take it."
Iodine -- which plays Toronto's new mecca for cinephiles, the independent Toronto Underground Cinema at 186 Spadina, June 18 and 23 -- was written, directed by and stars Mike Stasko as John Clem, a young man with mental health issues, and a job as a director of a self-help group. His life goes down the rabbit hole, however, when his distraught sister phones to tell him his father has gone missing at their family cottage.
Taking only enough of his meds for a one-day trip, he heads north to find out that his father is indeed gone. Down the shore he meets Avery (Wise), yet another professor, who lectures his classes at Columbia University via Skype from the cottage (nice gig, if you can get it).
Seems the two physicists had been doing thought experiments on the nature of matter and reality -- trippy stuff about living life as a shadow of some other dimensional existence, which feeds into John's paranoia as the meds begin wearing off.
"I'd been really getting into the idea of reality and quantum physics -- a lot of books, like (Michael Talbot's) The Holographic Universe and (Richard Morris') The Nature Of Reality. I was reading this stuff and becoming steeped in it, and all of a sudden I got this script and it was talking about those very same theories.
"I do a lot of independent movies these days. I just finished a couple of others, one called Crazy Eyes and another called The Butterfly Room. At this point in my life, money's almost never a requirement.
"So I read the script and saw Mike was going to star in it. I knew nothing about him as an actor, but I certainly liked his script. And he sent me a CD with mood music to play while I read it, some classical pieces, some contemporary. I just like his whole vibe."
Next stop: Port Perry. "I flew to Toronto and we went up to Lake Harris, on this little island in this large cabin home belonging to the Stasko family. The cast and crew had three meals a day served by Mike's mother. I had the biggest bedroom in the house, and they gave me a fruit basket with the biggest bottle of scotch in it. They treated me like a king.
"It was rather like a summer camp experience. Up early, around seven, and getting out there with the sun until it got too dark to work. Then play some Texas Hold'em at night. I think they let me win, because I made some money at the table to augment my salary."
Still, as many indie films as he squeezes into his resume, Wise knows Twin Peaks will follow him to his grave.
"It seems to have been a hit in different parts of the world at different times. I've made movies in France, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria -- I was really surprised about Romania. But everybody in that country knew my face. Cars would stop and offer Leland Palmer rides."
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