Mr Wilberforce is brought to life again in the new movie version of Under the Mountain. Scott Kara talks to actor Oliver Driver about channelling this slimy, evil alien and why it left little time for fun on set.
Like most New Zealand kids in the early 80s, Oliver Driver was scared witless by the TV series Under the Mountain.
"In a good way though," he says, putting on a brave face. "Sitting round with the family it was like our Dr. Who, or our Day of the Triffids. And I used to live in Takapuna, and had friends who lived beside Lake Pupuke, and I believed whole heartedly that the lake was bottomless and there were tunnels down there, man."
But now it's Driver doing the scaring as the evil, slug-like alien leader Mr Wilberforce in the movie version of Under the Mountain which opens in cinemas in December.
And the actor, whose day job is presenting TV3's breakfast show Sunrise, considers it an honour to play New Zealand's original movie monster.
"We don't have a Freddy Krueger, or anything like the Daleks. So for me growing up it was always Mr Wilberforce who was the nastiest, evilest guy that New Zealand has ever had. So just to play that kind of bad guy is something."
Driver laughs about how the original Mr Wilberforce - actor Bill Johnson - did a cameo for the movie and when he met him "a part of my brain still went, 'Argh, run away from him'."
Although, having revisited the TV series on DVD after he found out he had the part, he warns: "For the time it was great but you just watch it back now and it's like, 'Oh God, that's just a man with seaweed over him'."
Rest assured, the modern day Mr Wilberforce is far more scary and creepy.
Of course, the TV series was adapted from author Maurice Gee's 1979 children's story about the mysterious Mr Jones and two red-headed twins, Theo and Rachel, whose special powers are the only thing that can save the Earth from the Wilberforce clan who hide in the tunnels under Rangitoto, and Auckland's other volcanoes.
Director Jonathan King takes his lead for the film from this book.
And though Driver's first introduction to Under the Mountain was on TV he also read the book as a lad and rates Gee as his favourite New Zealand author.
He wasn't originally cast as Mr Wilberforce - Legend of the Seeker actor Bruce Spence was the first choice - but when funding problems hit Under the Mountain last year it threw the shooting scheduling out and Spence was no longer available.
So King, who recruited Driver for his horror comedy Black Sheep in 2007, in which the actor played Grant the environmental activist-turned-zombie sheep, asked him if he'd like to fill the role.
Driver jumped at the chance. Only this time he'd be wearing even more makeup, dripping with goo rather than blood, and he would be the pure embodiment of evil.
When coming up with his portrayal of Mr Wilberforce he focused on the character's intense, convulsing, and at times leaky physical appearance which was designed by Weta Workshop.
"I didn't want to bring back the guy from the TV series," he says of the jittery, grumpy old man style of Johnson's Mr Wilberforce. "Normally what I do is I play a version of myself. So it's me as a nurse, or me as an environmentalist, so I plot how I'm going to play it. But I can't do me as a 10,000-year-old alien dressed up as a man. So the big one I tried to concentrate on was the physicality of Mr Wilberforce - that it was really uncomfortable for this squid guy with tentacles to suck himself up into a man shape. "It's like holding on to a poo. Or needing to be sick. Your entire body is just straining," he laughs.
And the makeup and prosthetics, which took nearly five hours to apply, also helped Driver feel what it would be like to be stuck inside a body that's not your own.
One of the difficulties of the role was not being able to rehearse his lines properly until he was fully made up because the strained speech and contorting face and body movements were an essential part of the overall look and feel of the character.
Also, to make certain scenes work, Driver had to use some unusual and rather creepy methods to get them right. During one scene inside the Wilberforce house, when he's lurching towards the twins muttering, "Give me your sister", he imagined himself as a paedophile.
"Although I have no understanding of that mindset," he says, "it was an easier leg to get to than an alien creature trying to kill something. It was a trigger for me to play some old guy who has an evil motivation and plan."
His get-up didn't make for a very sociable time on set however. "You arrive two hours before the crew, you're in a bus for four and a half hours, you come out and you can't talk or interact with anybody. Part of the joy of doing a film is it's a hugely social fun environment but I spent six weeks in my trailer, not moving," he laughs.
Who: Oliver Driver as Mr Wilberforce
What:Under the Mountain, in cinemas December 10
