Playing the mossy guardian of the swamp in Wes Craven’s 1981 feature film, opposite Adrienne Barbeau, and a 1989 sequel co-starring Heather Locklear, Durock also donned the green suit for all 72 half-hour episodes of “Swamp Thing: The Series” in the early ‘90s.
The show, which is getting its first DVD collection treatment, lacked the big budget and technology that's made more recent comic book efforts successful (it also had a tendency to diverge into cheesiness), but Durock is still proud of the work. And, admittedly, a little bit haunted by it.
Were you reluctant about doing a TV series and wearing the Swamp Thing costume on a daily basis?
I was reluctant about putting on the suit—but I certainly wasn’t reluctant about cashing the checks! The suit was miserable. We did two shows a week, three days a show, 30 pages a show—a half-hour script—and it was mostly dialog. A soap opera does a lot of work with a lot of dialog, but here we’re running around a swamp in a special made outfit. They said it couldn’t be done, but we did it.
Did they find ways to improve the suit and make it slightly more tolerable for the series?
Not tolerable…you can’t use that definition! But the look of the suit and the ability to take it on and off was quantum leaps [beyond]. The first makeup took almost four hours and the suit was kind of, in retrospect, meh. The second one, it was down to two hours. By the time we got to the series, the look was much better and [so was] the practicality.
Is it hard to act through the makeup and suit?
Yeah, it really is. Because what you think you’re doing with your own face translates differently. It’s a difficult thing, and you have to have a good director who’s going to tell you you’ve got to let a little bit more come out.
What impact has this role had on you personally?
I have nightmares in green! No seriously, I had no idea that doing a series could be so much work. I used to talk with Lee Majors [star of “The Fall Guy”] and all the guys I worked with over the years, and I used to say, “You have it easy. You’ve got the limos and the trailers.” Well, then I found out when people handed me 10 pages of dialog a day: They earn their money, believe me.
Having attended a lot of fan conventions, what are some of the most common questions or comments you get?
“How did it feel to wear the suit?” Regarding the first two films it’s, “Who did you like better? Adrienne Barbeau or Heather Locklear?” And how do you answer that?
How did the costume and makeup on “Swamp Thing” compare to what you wore on “The Incredible Hulk” or the original “Battlestar Galactica”?
Swampy was totally different, because never in the history of Hollywood was there a situation where a guy put on a costume like this and worked in it for 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week.
I see you have a MySpace page. Do you spend a lot of time on the Internet?
I have a MySpace page? That’s news to me.
Looking back on “Swamp Thing: The Series,” how do you think it holds up?
They’re mostly simple stories and hopefully reasonably well done. I am proud of the fact that we never lost a day because of me on more than 70 episodes. And I am extremely proud to have been involved with that crew and cast.
If “Swamp Thing” were revived, would you want to be involved?
Of course I’d like to be involved—but not as Swamp Thing.
“Swamp Thing: The Series,” a four-disc set featuring 22 episodes and bonus interviews with Durock and “Swamp Thing” creator Len Wein, is released Tuesday, Jan. 22 from Shout! Factory.
