httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bujFhDHYAC4
A frequent del Toro collaborator, Doug Jones plays the aforementioned fish-man and said the closest he had come previously to “Playing a love interest in a monster suit” was in “Hellboy II: The Golden Army.”.
“So Randy’s on the case and he ends up following the trail to this cave that’s just outside of town and he ends up in t all by himself with some kind of weaponry, ready to take on this bug infestation – and he sees a 6-foot-5 mother bug played by, yes, Doug Jones! I am very proud to have on my resume Mother Bug, if you must know.”
“The long pincers were made of fiberglass, so ’s the discussion I had with Randy, who can barely see my face through this netting: ‘Randy, listen: I can’t see you very well so please be careful.’ And he says, ‘Doug, it’s OK, buddy, I’ll be fine! Do what you gotta do, we’ll get through this!’ So, no worries in the world. Great.”
“We have a hand-held camera following us for the entire fight scene and the swinging starts, the body-shoving, the banging into the walls of the cave, rolling around on the ground. And I felt myself connect with him a couple times with my arms, my pincers. And we end up with him on his back and me on top and they call ‘cut.’ A team of people have to help me get up so I can go back to my special bug chair that I lean forward on because I’ve got a stinger in my butt. So I’m breathing heavy because that was a lot to do in a heavy bug suit and I ask one of the makeup creature effects people, ‘Can you go check up on Randy? I didn’t see him get up.'”.
“A few years later I played an FBI agent that got turned into a carrot – now that’s a long story – for ‘The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle’ and Randy Quaid was playing the head of the FBI in that movie. We didn’t actually have any scenes together.”
“But we were all at the table read, w we sit down in a conference room and read the script out loud. So t was Randy Quaid playing the head of the FBI and I rounded the table before we started and said, ‘Randy, hi – you’re not going to recognize me. I’m Doug Jones and I played the Mother Bug in”Bug Buster”‘ and he’s like, ‘Oh my gosh! That was somethin’, wasn’t it?’ And I said, ‘Yes it was! I’m glad to see you’re standing and alive because I thought I almost killed you that day.
“What I learned that day was to rehearse a fight scene in costume before you do it, because so much can go wrong. And from watching Randy Quaid’s work ethic I thought, ‘Well, t’s a trouper.’ The show must go on, that’s an old saying in showbiz, and Randy Quaid was living proof of that. When you see the end product you realize we weren’t making art, but in the moment I loved his work ethic and I learned a lot from that.”