The Mummy - Arnold Vosloo: From Darkman to Imhotep, Changing One Set of Bandages for Another

By John Fordham. Cinefantastique Magazine. June 1999. Volume 31, Number 6

Born into a theatrical family, Arnold Vosloo took to the stage as a classically trained actor in his homeland of South Africa. After ten years of taking part in anti-apartheid theatre, Vosloo was invited to appear in his first American theatrical production in Chicago in the early '90s. Director Ridley Scott noted his imposing stage presence and cast Vosloo in the better of the two Columbus epics, 1492 (1992), playing sidekick to Michael Wincott's heavy. As much as he enjoyed the experience, Vosloo felt his 18-month sabbatical in America was over and headed for New York before wending his way back to South Africa. 

"I called my folks and said I'm coming home," he recalled. "Then Al Pacino's people called and asked me to come and read for Salome, the Oscar Wilde play. I was certain they were going to want a big name actor to take the role opposite Pacino and Sheryl Lee from Twin Peaks, who was great. But I was there in New York, and I said 'What the heck? I'm flying out in two days; I'll go in.' So I went in, and I was so filled with fear I gave a good reading and they hired me!" 

The New York theatre crowd turned out in droves to see Pacino, who had not set foot on broadway since American Buffalo eight years earlier. Once again, Vosloo made a big impression, which resulted in his second cinematic role - another bad guy, this time for acclaimed Hong Kong action director John Woo, who was making his American theatrical debut with Hard Target - produced by Jim Jacks at Alphaville Productions, who would

later produce The Mummy. 

Before teaming up again with Jacks, Vosloo's genre connections began to take root in a more circuitous route with John Woo introducing Vosloo to film-maker Sam Raimi. Raimi at that time was searching for a new face to don the Darkman mask, taking over from Liam Neeson. "I did Darkman 2 and Darkman 3 for Sam so it's kind of interesting," Vosloo observed. "My wife pointed out to me the other night - I didn't really think about it when I

took on The Mummy, but alot of genre fans might know me from these Darkman films. It seems like it's gone this way. I just finished another horror movie before The Mummy with Brian Yusna, whom I loved. It's called Progeny and will probably go straight-to-video. Some classic Yusna, about a doctor and his wife impregnated by an alien, or at least he believes that she is. He sneaks her into the operating room and cuts her open. It was pretty creepy. Now I'm doing all this horror genre stuff, which is kind of nice." 

An admitted horror fan - who lists Phantasm as his taste - Vosloo is aware of the problems associated with being typecast into the horror world. Nevertheless, he has enjoyed the unexpected challenge. "Had you asked me how I thought I might make it in Hollywood, I would have thought I'd go in on the character bad guy stuff. I never would have dreamed that it would have been The Mummy. If this movie works, it'll change my life. For

better or for worse, I can't tell you now. Because I am the shark in Jaws. I'm the fire in Towering Inferno. I am the disaster in the disaster movie. That really does type you in a way. But I'm really proud of the film, and I'm proud of what we achieved." 

"The challenge that Universal is going to have with this film, certainly for the MTV crowd, is to change the whole public perception of this character. It's always been a guy running around in rags, stumbling through the streets with tampons hanging from his head - it's completely not that in this movie. There's never really been a movie where the Mummy has had super powers. There's never been a movie where the Mummy has been really scary.

I think Stephen's script addressed all that, so I think it's going to be pretty wild."

.....

Mummy Dearest

By Eric Moro (13thstreet, May, 2001)

A Mummy Reborn

What would a sequel to Universal’s wildly successful The Mummy be without the return of its lead haunt? A disappointment, to say the least. That’s why Arnold Vosloo, the actor responsible for reviving Egyptian lord of the undead Im-Ho-Tep in the 1999 remake, comes back for this summer’s The Mummy Returns, but this time he’s bringing a friend professional wrestler The Rock in a non-WWF performance).

While some would credit Vosloo with the successful retelling of the horror classic (after all, his performance as the mummy far surpasses that of Christopher Lee), the actor attributes the film’s success to the creative genius behind it – friend and neighbor Stephen Sommers.

"Steve and I work out in the morning out in the Palisades where we live," says Vosloo. "I remember he was busy writing the sequel and I never spoke to him about it because I know that he’s sick enough to dream all this stuff up on his own. He takes full credit and whether its crash and burn or wildly successful, it’s all owed to him."

Vosloo admits having little to no input in the creative direction of the sequel, however he does recall a conversation in which he and Sommers discussed the making of a successful follow-up.

"I remember asking him one morning, ‘what makes agood sequel?’ because so few of them are successful," recalls Vosloo. "I think there’s only a 20% success rate, but Steve said he’s been studying a lot of the sequels – the successful ones – and the ones that are really good are the ones that are the same, but different. If you look at the The Mummy Returns, it’s really true. It’s the same, but different. Instead of a wall of sand, there’s a wall of water, etc. It’s all sort of amped up a bit."

Not Your Father’s Mummy

When re-envisioning the title character for the 1999 film as well as its 2001 follow-up, both Vosloo and Sommers agreed it would have to be a monster for the new millennium – a villain that would frighten today’s most hardened movie going audience.

"I think with all the technology today, kids wouldn’t buy [a mummy wrapped in bandages]," says Vosloo. "That’s sort of one of the things about the first Mummy movies that always amazed me. Looking back on them now, why were people scared of the mummy? Surely, you could just run away from this guy that’s walking around the neighborhood in pajamas and bandages. It’d be easy just to run away from him, so we have to hype it up a bit and create a whole new mummy."

Part of recreating the character for a modern audience required going deep into his past – ancient Egypt, to be exact. As such, the onscreen language spoken by Im-Ho-Tep is as close to what scholars believe people of that time period actually spoke. That is, of course, when Vosloo’s not adlibbing.

"We worked with a guy called Dr. Stuart Smith from UCLA and he’s an Egyptologist," says Vosloo. "He put all this stuff on tape for us and it’s kind of the closest we can come to what we think the actual language sounded like. It’s like ancient Latin. When we speak Latin now we think it’s what it sounded like, but we’re not really sure. The problem with a lot of this Egyptian stuff is words like ‘look out’ become like 10 lines. Steve would go, ‘No, no, no. Lose the first four words. Say that word and then say the last word.’ So basically, I’d end up making the stuff up.

Stomach like a Rock

As audiences anxiously await The Rock’s (a.k.a. Dwayne Johnson) onscreen debut as the Scorpion King, Vosloo tells a story that depicts his counterpart as more of a soft dirt clod than a hardened rock.

"I met The Rock in Morocco and the first time I saw him he had a mound of food on his plate," says Vosloo. "I said to him, ‘Are you going to eat that?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, dude what do you think?’ I was like, ‘Well, you shouldn’t, you know?’ And he said, ‘No, we wrestle in places all over the world and we’re used to weird food.’ I said, ‘Alright.’ And then like four or five days later when I flew out, I think the last time I saw him he was running for the bathroom in a big way."

Unfortunately, stomach related illnesses are par for the course when shooting in exotic locales. However, Vosloo learned from his first outing and took precautions this second time around.

"I got sick on the first Mummy," says Vosloo. "But this time, I took all my own food. I took cans of tuna and Power Bars. I literally did not eat anything from there. I just took everything with and I didn’t get sick. I was one of the few people that didn’t get sick."

 In terms of actually working with Johnson, Vosloo has very little to say on the matter. The two never appeared together in any one scene. The film’s climax, which depicts Vosloo and Johnson locked in combat, was actually done using a CG Rock.

"When Brendan and I are [fighting with the Rock at the end], there was nothing there," says Vosloo. "It was like a skinny ILM guy with a stick and a piece of tape on it moving where the scorpion was supposed to be. So we never interacted at all on screen."

Mummy3

With The Mummy Returns poised to take the summer box office by storm and a prequel to the franchise (The Scorpion King) already in the works, Vosloo hints at the possibility of yet another follow-up film. After all, Universal is known for its "movie monster" franchises of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

"Clearly, the reason we’re sitting around this table today is because the first Mummy almost made – whatever – $400 or $500 million dollars," says Vosloo. "I think if this one – I don’t know what dollar amount it has to make – but I assume domestically in the states, if it makes $100 or $150 million there will definitely be a third one."

While each individual actor will have to make his or her own decision, Vosloo promises his involvement in a follow-up feature pending one condition.

I’ll definitely come back if Stephen Sommers is involved because he really is the star of this movie," says Vosloo. "He is the mummy. He’s just such a freak and he really kind of carries the mantle and if he wrote the next one then I would be involved in it."

In regards to being stereotyped as a movie monster villain (look what happened to Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney), Vosloo has a very practical outlook on the subject.

"I’ve been doing this for 24 years and I think there are a few guys that can really plan their careers," says Vosloo. "Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise might be able to sit back and say, ‘Let me play this guy or that guy.’ They’ve got like 10 scripts to choose from. For a guy like me, I just kind of take what comes along if its good stuff. So if there’s going to be a third one then that’ll be great and if that’s all that happens for me then so be it."

...........

UNDER WRAPS 

Goodbye, Boris Karloff - there’s a scary new Mummy in Egypt, played by Arnold Vosloo! 

By Pat Jankiewicz, XPOSE Magazine (Issue #34, 1999) 

Forget the slow shuffling Mummies of the past played by Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Lon Chaney, Jr.  In the brand new The Mummy from Universal Studios, the bandaged one is now an elemental force of nature.  He can cause the Earth to shake, plagues of bees and locusts to attack and pyramids to crumble.  In short, actor Arnold Vosloo declares, “I’m not your grandfather’s Mummy!” 

When this dangerous new Mummy comes alive in the 1920s, only Brendan Fraser, as an Indiana Jones-like adventurer, has any chance of stopping him. South African actor Arnold Vosloo has an interesting new take on The Mummy.  “The reason I got the job is when I went in, I said ‘Look, if I did this, I would be really interested in playing this as a man in love.  I expect women to fall in love with a Mummy, not Brendan Fraser.’ After all, it is about a guy who wakes up after 3,000 years and the first thing he wants to see is the woman he loves, Anck-su-namun.  I was really interested in the love story aspect and not the monster.  If he was just a monster spewing bees and flies, it wouldn’t be as interesting.” 

While the film is a period piece, “They’re pushing the FX and action adventure aspects of it because they don’t want people to think it’s this dreary, slow-walking Mummy movie.  It’s less a horror movie than it is an action-adventure like Raiders of the Lost Ark. “I had done a movie called Hard Target for producer Jim Jacks, who also did The Mummy.  He brought me in to audition.  They were looking at some fairly big movie stars because DiNiro had done Frankenstein, and they thought they would cast a big star as the Mummy opposite Brendan, thankfully that didn’t happen!” 

Before he becomes The Mummy, “I play the high priest of Egypt [Imhotep].  High priests had a very privileged position in Egypt,” Vosloo explains.“They were second or third in command to the Pharaoh.  Unfortunately, I fell in love with the Pharaoh’s wife.  We kiss in a scene where she’s completely naked - but she’s painted in gold.  I smudge some of the body paint on her shoulder when I kiss her and The Pharoah walks in and sees the smudge.  He says ‘Who’s been near you?  Who touched you!’  “When the Pharaoh realized is was me, we kill him and because of that, they put her to death.  I escape and because as a high priest, I’m the only person whocan bring her back to life, with a Book of the Dead.  “I do bring her back to life, but I get foiled by the new Pharaoh who discovers this and condemns me to be buried alive.”This is the only time in the film where he will be seen dressed as the traditional Hollywood Mummy. “They wrap me up and bury me,” the actor laughs.  “There may only be 10 seconds where I’m actually wrapped up.  It may be the worst thing I do in the movie.  It was just awful; they wrapped me tight in bandages and

put me in a coffin.  The shot took 20 seconds to do but it was a weird feeling.  They bury me alive, then 3,000 years later in 1925, somebody bread from the Book of the Living and that’s what resurrects me and brings me Back.”  In order to play his elemental Egyptian, the actor, “did some research and worked with an Egyptologist at UCLA in terms of the speech, because there’s no recorded version of ancient Egyptian.  We have no idea what it sounds like, so for parts of my dialogue in the movie in Egyptian, I made it up on set and only I know what I say!” Bringing The Mummy to life took and array of special FX.  “They are amazing,” he declares.  “It’s an amalgamation of live action and  computer FX, they’re extraordinary,by Industrial Light and Magic.  They even had me wear a special ‘virtual suit’ to record my movements for the computer. 

 “I found that difficult at first.  It was hard to believe that if I wore this virtual suit, it would translate onto film.  I said, 'Why don't you use a mime or a dancer, somebody who could really move in the way you want them to?' but they were absolutely adamant: 'No.  You have to do this, otherwise we won't recognize you when you're the skeleton.'  When the Mummy is dug up, the first time we see him, he's a skeleton. "There are four stages of Mummy and he has to kill four different guys and get back these sarcophic jars that have vital organs in them of this woman he loved," Vosloo explains.  "Each time he kills a person, he regenerates. "At first I couldn';t believe people would recognize me doing this stuff, but as we were shooting, I became attached to it.  I would look in the computer and see myself move as a skeleton.  It was amazing.  I can imagine 50 years in the future, where, as an actor, you sell your face.  They give you a big check, you sell your face and they do a 3-D scan of your face.  That's gonna happen, I have no doubt. 

"THEY WRAPPED ME TIGHT IN BANDAGES AND PUT ME IN A COFFIN"

........

Playing the Mummy Drove Me Embalmy - Star scared off his lover when he got wrapped up in horror role

By Alexander Hitchen. News Of The World, June 27th 1999

With a sickening final thud, the lid on the Egyptian stone coffin closed on a terrified Arnold Vosloo. 

Locked in darkness, he felt the rasp of giant maggots and beetles scuttle across his embalmed body, scenting his fear, searching out every crevice in the stinking, dust-encrusted bandages wrapped tight around his limbs. 

Arnold, star of this weekend's smash-hit new film The Mummy, squirmed and waited...He was a professional. He knew the movie cameras were outside, ready to capture his horrific rise from the grave. And yet part of him also realized this was no performance. In the pitch black, something very strange was happening to his personality. 

Though he could scarcely believe it, this was the Curse of Imhotep, High Priest of Osiris and Keeper of the Dead.

And it was so strong that it forced his girlfriend Sylvia to flee from his side, terrified at the change in a lover she thought she knew so well. "Sylvia and I had been together for two years," he admitted. "We were planning to settle down, get married and have kids. But after a few days she suddenly faced me, and said, 'You've changed. You're not the same man who you were when you started work on the movie. You're frightening and I can't stand it. You know what's happening to you? You're turning into him." 

Arnold added: "She was just spooked out and took off back to California. I realize now I might have lost her for good. But at the time I was so far into the role that I could think of nothing else. Of course The Mummy is the stuff of myth and legend, but my whole mental attitude and personality changed." 

Recalling those black moments in the coffin the 39-year-old Arnold added: "I knew there were just 30 real beetles and 200 rubber ones. But for weeks afterwards I found myself waking up in a sweat long after I was

safe at home." 

The Mummy, a £60 million special effects epic, opened in Britain on Friday. The film has already made more than £100 million in America and spawned Mummy mania in shops, with children clamoring for Mummy dolls and video

games. 

Arnold, an imposing 6ft 4ins with a great dome of a shaven head, plays high priest Imhotep. He is sentenced to die and be mummified after being caught in a compromising position with the Pharaoh’s wife. 

He is buried alive, his body sticky with embalming fluid for the bandages that would cover every inch of his shuddering flesh. Before his sarcophagus, or stone coffin, is sealed, the embalmer empties a container of sacred scarabs – giant sized Egyptian beetles – in with him. They crawl into Imhotep’s mouth and curse him to be undead forever. Imhotep rises out of his coffin after being disturbed by a group of archaeologists played by Brendan Frazer, John Hannah and Rachael Weisz. 

"The sight of me will make you jump out of your seat." Arnold smiled, his teeth glinting like gravestones caught in the moonlight. It’s easy to laugh at it now, but who knows what shape the legendary curse of the mummy takes? "We filmed part of the movie in Britain, at Sheperton Studios, Sylvia came over from Los Angeles to join me. There were these huge underground sets built to resemble the Necropolis, The Place of the Dead. And it got to me. 

"That’s when she told me I was turning into Imhotep. Luckily she didn’t come to the desert with me." Other parts of The Mummy were filmed in the vast sandy wastes of of Morocco. "That’s when I knew something was really happening to me," said Arnold darkly. 

"I didn’t feel like socializing with the other cast or crew. I’d go to my room and stand at the window staring out into the desert night. Or sometimes I’d go out walking by myself. Unlike filming in a town, or in the jungle, both of which are filled with things happening. In the desert there’s nothing. The space goes on forever. I found my thoughts tuning to death of course. I mean, what might he buried under the sand I was walking on?" 

Arnold, who is South African added: "In my mind I went hack to my childhood, growing up in Pretoria. In the 70s, before they had television, my family used to run 16mm films on a projector at our home. We’d have a barbecue and drinks, and then my father would screen a full length fea ture film, with a short film to back it up. 

"I was a teenager when we got hold of Psycho and can still remember how scared I was when I saw it. Not just the shower scene — something worse Anthony Perkins at the end, smiling and staring. And in the darkness of my hotel room, both in Morocco and in London, I kept seeing that face in the window. Smiling and staring." 

That legacy of horror turned Arnold’s performance into a movie classic and the film’s director Stephen Sommers raves over his star. "We didn’t even have to audition him," he said. "As soon as he walked into the room when we were casting I knew he was right for the title role. There’s something about him, a presence, a power, this great look. I promise you, he’ll go down in history with Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee." 

SPHINX are also looking up on the home front. Arnold added: "Luckily, after it was all over and I was back in the real world, it all changed. I was able to get back to normal with Sylvia, though it took a few weeks for me to become human again. When I came to my senses I knew she was the girl for me and that I couldn’t bear, to lose her So I popped the question." 

Arnold proposed earlier this year, they married soon after wards, till death us do part. Though Arnold will never forget the message lmhotep scratched in his own blood on the lid of the coffin, "Death is only the beginning."

............

Have You Met Mr. Vosloo, the Sexiest Mummy in the World?

By John Millar. Courtesy of The Herald, taken from Reuters Online

Arnold Vosloo looks, well, hard. The sort of guy with who it would be ill-advised to mess. A story - which may be apocryphal, as many showbiz tales are - about the 36- year old actor's days in uniform only adds to the image. 

It's claimed that when he was doing a tour of duty in the army, at home in South Africa, that going for a swim required a fair degree of toughness. When Arnold and his army buddies wanted to cool off with a dip in the river they had to make sure that it was clear of crocodiles. They did that by lobbing a few grenades into the water. The story is told by a smiling Rachel Weisz, Arnold's co-star in the huge horror hit The Mummy, who adds that

the South African is "hard and fit". 

Rachel also says that, although he looks like an archetypal Hollywood villain, Vosloo is a good guy. During my conversation with the tall actor I discovered she was right and that this screen baddie is actually an old-fashioned romantic. Vosloo proved that last year when he married his girlfriend of three years, Sylvia, in an impromptu wedding ceremony in Las Vegas. 

The couple were in Las Vegas for a birthday party when Vosloo whisked her off to the Strip to marry. It was not the best organized event. He hadn't even thought about simple things...like a witness. 

Vosloo turns on the sex appeal and charm in The Mummy as the slap-headed Imhotep, an Egyptian high priest who is cursed to a living hell after having a fling with the pharaoh's mistress. Naturally, as in all good horror hokum, he rises from the grave and uses the 10 plagues to cause havoc. 

This meant that Vosloo had to work, very patiently, with the film's computer experts. A scene which lasts a few seconds on screen would take days to film. One sequence, in which a scarab beetle appears to wriggle just under Vosloo's skin until it reaches his face, took three days to shoot. 

But the actor doesn't complain. "I wasn't bored. Instead, I looked on it as a challenge to do things as precisely as the computer team demanded," he says. 

The South African - whose first language is Afrikaans and his parents were actors who ran a drive-in theatre when cash was short - sent more than a few female hearts fluttering at the screening of The Mummy that I attended. 

Now Vosloo, whose films include Ridley Scott's 1492, and the John Woo action hit, Hard Target, is tipped to make an impact on the big screen. He's flattered to be told that he's the first sexy mummy in movie history and that he's destined for greater cinematic glory. But he takes all that on board with a large helping of salt. His down-to-earth attitude explains why he has deliberately not tried to cash in on being high up on the bill of a

big-budget affair like The Mummy. 

"There is a lot of work in Hollywood but so much of it is not very good. You can do a lot of films and make money but that'll last three or four years and then you'll never work again," he says. "The Mummy is not Chekhov, but it's fun, and I got to play such a seminal horror character. Now if the movie makes millions I suppose I'll get offered every bad guy from here on. So, the real challenge is deciding what to do next. Should you play the bad

guy opposite Bruce Willis in some awful movie, or take on a more interesting small film or corner the market in horror. It's kind of scary." Before making The Mummy, Vosloo had only seen the 1932 version, starring Boris Karloff, and he says that he was a fan. Arnold also agreed that being in this sort of sequel placed him under a fair bit of pressure. "That's because The Mummy is such an icon," he says. "I was very much aware of that because I want horror fans to look at the movie and say that Arnold Vosloo did okay, he didn't embarrass Boris Karloff."