After two Hellboy movies, actor Ron Perlman is on top of the world. In fact, as you'll see, his dreams are coming true. No stranger to working in make-up, behind the mask of a character, Perlman was the right person the bring Hellboy to live-action life on the big screen back in 2004. Now Perlman returns to the character made famous by Mike Mignola in the comic book series and director Guillermo del Toro on the big screen for Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

With Hellboy II storming into theaters, Ron Perlman had a blast with the press in L.A. sharing stories of life, Hellboy, and how his world is just ducky now that his dreams are finally being realized.

Ron Perlman on how Hellboy has changed since the first movie:

"I don’t know if you’ve seen the picture, but it will be interspecies babies - two. And I’m just as curious about what they’re going to look like as the next guy. The beautiful thing about Hellboy is that he’s set, he doesn’t change. He was incredibly well articulated from the get-go the minute Guillermo decided to put the words 'shooting script' on Hellboy 1, and his circumstances change greatly. The forces at work, trying to alter his paths change dramatically, but the heart of the guy is luckily set in stone. I don’t believe he feels any real need to change. He’s always going to be the same, only the circumstances change. In the second film of course the circumstances are that he’s not living with Liz and it’s really not going well and he’s looking at the idea of what his limitations are as a mate and as a man in a relationship with something that he can’t afford to lose, because if he loses Liz he loses his reason to live. So he starts drinking and he happens to have to save the world while he’s a little bit buzzed. I kind of like that aspect, but all purely circumstantial. The heart of the guy I think is identical to the one we created in the first movie."

Perlman on how he tapped into the sensitivity of the character:

"I happen to have a very strong feminine side, I don’t know. I think maybe I say that jokingly, but I’ve been incredibly sensitive to all of the knocks I’ve taken, and I’m not unique. Everybody takes them. Everybody deals with them in their own way. My way of making things right that were dreadfully wrong at various periods of my life is I get a chance to exercise them through acting. And it’s one of the joys of being an actor is to be able to look at these things that remind you of chapters in your life and kind of recreate them for yourself so that - You know, it’s almost like therapy. You look at something really long and hard, and you explore it really long and hard, until it’s like, ‘Whew, okay we just got past that.’ For me, acting is like therapy. But there’s nothing that Hellboy feels that I haven’t felt in some measure at some point in my life, and I just try to draw on all of that and - that, plus the fact that he so evocatively and so specifically articulated by the author, by Guillermo, that it’s pretty clear what you have to do in playing him. That’s a true gift. You don’t always get that in a screenplay. One of the many gifts of working with this true genius."

On how he views the make-up side of the character:

"It depends. I mean, every job is different. Every job has a different set of givens and a different set of circumstantial things that build up to all of the decisions about how the guy walks, how the guy talks, what he sounds like when he speaks, what sign is he. I try to create as full - It’s a secret. It’s something only I know, but the more specific I can get the more specific I think that the behavior of the character will become. When you’re putting on a mask, you really have to kind of wait to see what the guy who designed the character has done physically before you begin to make those decisions, because what he looks like is going to definitely inform all of those things I mentioned. In the case of Hellboy, it was clear that this is just a bad-ass, just a total G - you know, G, as in gangsta. I just dug and dug, and dug down some more, try to bottom voice and my most swaggerest of walks and, viola, there he was."

On working behind masks:

"When I was first starting out in this business, I was really quite uncomfortable in my own skin. And luckily the good lord provided these roles almost in chronological order. First, Quest for Fire, which was mask acting, then Name of the Rose, which was mask acting, and then Beauty and the Beast, all happened during a period of my life where I was more comfortable behind a mask than I would’ve been naked, like this. It freed me up. It made me freer because it was no longer me. It was a transformed version of me, which was very abstract in relation to my own persona. So it made acting more possible and more freeing. These days I’m in my late 50s and I’m quite comfortable in my own skin and I no longer need the mask as much as I used to. So it becomes, ‘How much pleasure am I going to take in playing a masked character?’ And when the character is Hellboy, the answer is, ‘Man, I’m sure there’s a whole lot of other guys that wish they were me.’ And this is a real honor to play this character because the heart of the character is truly mythic, truly legendary and epic in scope, and he’s a phenomenal character to spend time with."

Ron Perlman on his sci-fi work:

"In regards to science fiction, I have done a tremendous amount of work in science fiction. It’s all coincidental. I’ve never been in the position financially to ever say no to work, and since that was the work that came mostly, that was the work I took. My own personal taste, I watch the Turner Classic movie channel. My thing is old black and white movies. I’m a freak for John Ford and George Stevens and Raoul Walsh, Gary Grant, Burt Lancaster, Gary Cooper, and Billy Wilder. When it’s my time, that’s what I find myself doing, and I’m obsessed with the old studio days and the beginnings of cinema, especially in the United States. But clearly around the world as well, Kurisowa, Faustbinder, Wedmueller - I’m leaving out so many of my heroes, but those are my personal tastes."

On whether he worries about getting typecast in this genre:

"I’m sure I did. [laughs] I’m feeling so carefree these days that I don’t remember ever worrying about anything. I mean my life is just ducky right now. The things that have happened to me have gone so far beyond anything I might have dreamed or imagined that I stopped dreaming and imagining. I just basically wake up every day and take what the good lord gave me because it’s pretty trippy. It’s pretty trippy that we were able to do Hellboy with a guy who’s basically lived on the fringes pretty much his whole career, never been invited to the mainstream party, and sort of backed his way in with the good graces of Guillermo del Toro fighting for me for seven years. So it’s all like... it’s phenomenal."

Ron Perlman on why his life is so ducky right now:

"My family is doing good, everybody is firing on all cylinders. We’re a family of artists and my son has just gotten into his college of choice and he wants to have a career in music. My daughter just made her first album and she’s in Hellboy and wants to be an actress. She’s firing on all cylinders. My wife is a fashion designer and she does amazingly remarkable. Guillermo pointed it out to me that I’m the least talented member of the Perlman family and he’s absolutely right I’m far and away the least talented. But things are going really well. I've got this new TV series on FX, which the writing is absolutely superb and the character is unlike anything I’ve ever attempted before. Work is coming and all of the things that I ever dreamed about are really beginning to happen. So when your dreams come true, how does it get any better than that?"