An Exclusive Interview
I’m walking up to the quaint suburban facade of a home in Burbank, California. Dense vegetation spurts from the ground, casting layers of topical shadows on the windows. When the door opens, The Blob is there in his usual shade of burgundy wearing a grey Rick Owens bathrobe. He peels the gold, gelatinous undereye brightening pads off his face as if he only then realized they were on his face.
“Oh, hey.” He says, nonchalantly, and motions me inside. The interior is Hollywood classic with tile, deep wood furniture, and tropical plants. I dodge a wilting collection of pink balloons on the stairs– it is the Monday after Valentine’s Day. Stacks of vintage comic books and playbills sit in plastic sleeves on side tables, huge abstract paintings cover the walls to the point of feeling like you could step through them into various maroon voids. The Blob’s home makes sense, moody but spare, dark but refined.
When The Blob oozes onto the couch, he launches up to offer me a green juice “with or without activated charcoal?” He uses an eclectic frother to mix his beverage. I decline the charcoal but sip my green juice politely as The Blob rolls around, hurriedly turning off a record player and sliding an Ella Fitzgerald vinyl away.
It has been almost seventy-eight years since his star-making role in the 1958 film entitled The Blob. Co-starring alongside Steven McQueen and Aneta Corsaut, The Blob portrayed a lifeform similar to himself that attacked a small Pennsylvania town, engulfing humans and destroying public infrastructure. Reprising this role only twice in 1972’s Beware! The Blob, and the 1988 remake of the original, The Blob has led a quiet life since, collecting and painting mostly, as he tells me.
“I’ve stayed to myself a lot over the years. It’s hard to lead a public life as a non-Newtonian fluid in the public eye. It’s gotten harder over the years.” The Blob tells me of his decline from public view. Even during his prime, he was committed to his work, opting out of press coverage even as his agent protested. “I never saw any of the movies in the theater. Never. Not even the premiere. I get too anxious,” he adds before finishing his tar-black juice. It’s hard to tell if his sour expression is from the mouthful of carbon, or the bitter memory.
The Blob grew up in a largely normal household in the Suburbs of Reno, Nevada. His father, The Blob Sr. immigrated from space via asteroid, not dissimilar to the origin of The Blob’s character in the film. When Blob Sr. was thirty years old, he asexually reproduced his son. Shortly after The Blob Sr. would meet his wife and Blob Jr.’s mother, Sandra Jenkins. Sandra worked as an interior designer while Blob Sr. spent most of his career working at a pinball and slot machine manufacturer as both a game designer, engineer, and extraterrestrial consultant. “Dad would take me in to play with the games when I was little, sometimes I would climb inside the games, feel around a little bit.” As The Blob grew older, he began to face some level of xenophobia from his classmates and community. “When you’re not humanoid…that presents some challenges to making friends…that sort of thing. You don’t want to scare people away, but you can’t help it.”
When he was in high school, The Blob was bitten by the theatre bug, notably playing the roles of Mercutio and Oberon in school plays. On the weekends he would attend the movies with his classmates. “That was a weird moment for me, on set. In the theatre scene, we only had one take with the tearaway screen. And I was looking down as these kids, these people, ran away screaming. And I thought to myself, ‘wow, it wasn’t too long ago that I was looking up at a movie screen watching.’ I thought I was going to look distracted. But I think when you watch it…I’m just so vacant and cold. It’s chilling. Then when I saw the actual cut of the film, I was blown away. Truly.”
The Blob’s story began shortly after graduation, he moved to L.A. with a close friend and began pounding the pavement as a Hollywood hopeful. After getting cast in a local production of A Streetcar Named Desire as Stanley, naturally, he was noticed by an executive assistant at Paramount Pictures for his moving performance. Shortly after he began to do bit roles in B-movies. “I was soups, Jello dishes, that sort of thing. Nothing fulfilling.”
When he met screenwriting duo Kay Linaker and Theodore Simonson, they became fast friends. The three of them would tear up the town, and “drink the town dry.” As they got closer, The Blob told Linaker and Simonson about his childhood in Nevada, and the two of them began to work on a script inspired by the likes of The War of the Worlds and the rising popularity of science fiction films.
Old movie posters crowd the office at the back of the house. An overstuffed leather recliner sits in the corner behind the desk. The Blob comments on the ergonomic nature of it before launching into an animated rant about the making of the original Blob film. “It was the most exciting time in my life! I was so caught up in all of it. I had never been to the East Coast, and I had never sweat so much in my life as that summer in Pennsylvania, oh my god. I was glistening the entire shoot. Every shot, I’m glossy like a magazine. It’s embarrassing.” He digs through his filing cabinet before plonking a stack of draft scripts in front of me titled The Ooze Ball From Outer Space, or The Dollop. “At the time I was flattered when they used my name. Made me feel famous.” The Blob folds in on himself, sagging into a puddle.
“I got paid for the role, sure, but story rights? No. Half that shit is ripped from my dad’s life, my life. Whatever else is in there is borderline defamatory.”
The Blob throughout his career avoided the spotlight for this very reason. Some of the most hurtful discourse that circulated after the premiere of the film was that The Blob’s role in the film was mostly practical effects. In retaliation for declining to participate in the press tour for the film, all of The Blob’s credits on the film were scrubbed from the record. The Blob was unaware at the time, returning home for several months to care for his ailing father. The film premiered in September. The Blob Sr. would die of prostate cancer that December.
When we break for lunch, The Blob offers to buy despite my protests. We drive in his forest green 1962 Ford Thunderbird to a local Vietnamese restaurant with the top down. At this point, The Blob has changed into a quaint Thom Browne ensemble; khaki slacks with a button-down and tie. What completes the ensemble is a fedora. “It’s very noir, I know.” The Blob yells over the buffeting wind. The Blob spends the rest of the ride asking about my upbringing, my favorite films, and highly recommending that I purchase a thousand-dollar espresso machine. “They cost an arm and a leg, but if you like the stuff it improves your quality of life by thirty percent.”
As The Blob entirely absorbs his Banh Mi sandwich, dissolving it into a sludge of pickled vegetables and shredded pork, I ask him about why he would accept an interview now. He wipes his face with a napkin, coating it in a viscous magenta sludge. “Well, ooze is making a comeback.” After many years of disrespect in the industry, The Blob has finally had it. “I’ve put in a lot of hours into this work, and I’m grateful that my investments and roles have been profitable enough to support me all these years. But if that weren’t the case…I’d be in a very different situation. The reason that I’ve stopped working, is that I can’t find work.” Despite his cool facade, The Blob is emotionally fraught. A fork becomes absorbed into him, turning into sulfuric goo. “I went out for this role this past year, it was the only thing in maybe a few decades that went to my desk that pulled me in. But despite pouring myself into the tape, the only feedback they had was that I was too old. Ridiculous. And the sting of it is…that role was The Substance of The Substance. You know, the movie about how the industry disrespects an aging Hollywood star… ”
After he pays and we’re on the road again, The Blob can’t help but doubt his frustration. “I had a conversation with her, actually.” I inquire if he means Demi Moore. “No, that young green sludge. It was after the fact, to congratulate her. She was very nice. And it’s not to say that I deserved the role more than her; liquifying oneself to be injected is a very difficult thing to do and she doesn’t get the props for that nearly enough as she does. I just mean to say…I’d like to give it another go. Dissolve another town, goop it up once again. Maybe star alongside some other oozes. And as much as we say it, we deserve more representation in Hollywood. We just do.”
Connor Stanford is a senior theatre studies major who is producing a goo-forward romantic thriller. You can reach Connor at [email protected].