KROKUS Frontman Discusses His Role In 'Anuk' Movie

Mark Carras of RockMyMonkey.com recently conducted an interview with KROKUS singer Marc Storace. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Rock My Monkey: Now, your drummer, Stefan Schwarzmann, recently revealed that he played an entire tour with a ruptured hernia. Will his recovery leave the band sidelined at all, and is there any permanent damage that he has to worry about?

Marc Storace: Well, not that we think of. He was in pretty good shape, and seems to be dealing with it very well. Now he's just going to go and get it stitched up. Apparently this isn't something that's too complicated, either. We're going to have time. Luckily we just finished the tour, and it wasn't such a long tour. We were away for three weeks. He played like an animal, like a machine, every night anyway. That's Stefan Schwarzmann for you. He comes from a school of ACCEPT and HELLOWEEN, adapted the groove of KROKUS. I have never played with a better drummer my whole life. I think, yeah, he's a tough guy. I think he'll be over it and then he's got his Christmas holidays. By the time we get back and hit the road, he's going to be okay I think. So I have no fears about that.

Rock My Monkey: You recently co-starred with the beautiful and talented Doro Pesch in the movie "Anuk - The Path of the Warrior".

Marc Storace: You're very well informed.

Rock My Monkey: Well, thank you.

Marc Storace: You know about Stefan's hernia, and you know about Doro and our co-starring and co-singing. (laughs) Cool. OK.

Rock My Monkey: You starred in the movie "Path of the Warrior" with her. Was that your first adventure into acting?

Marc Storace: Actually the whole band, KROKUS, recently acted on a movie called "Handyman". The song "Hellraiser", which I wrote in my kitchen one Sunday morning, ended up on that movie soundtrack. The whole band ended up on this comedy movie, which deals with the show business, and driving in a limousine to a concert and having a wreck. (laughs) The comedian, Marco Rima, is very well known in Europe. I hope that they're going to translate the film from German to English so that you can see it there. It's really funny. It's up there with the Belushis and so on, you know? It's great.

Rock My Monkey: Cool. Now that "Anuk - Path of the Warrior" is done, and the "Handyman", would you ever do any more movies? Is that something you're actually interested in now?

Marc Storace: These roles just flew in through my window. I didn't go searching for a movie role. And they're connected with me as a singer. So I guess it's a natural progression. And if it goes on this way, I have absolutely nothing against it. Okay, one has to sit around waiting in between the shoots, but it's the same like in the music business. You do a lot of sitting around waiting, driving to and from. With "Anuk - Path of the Warrior", it was also a progression, because I had a longer part, and I wasn't playing myself. I was playing a medicine man, the medicine man of this mountain tribe who almost gets annihilated by these masked horseman, and they have never seen a horse before, so you can imagine the terror that hit them. So anyway, Anuk goes on and retrieve the slaves that they took away with them, so his people would not go extinct. And I'm the medicine man, and I get killed in the first part of the movie, like so I'm gone within the first half an hour. (laughs) And then Doro comes on the scene, because she saves Anuk's life, because he's wounded, and he's been lying there for a couple of days, and she picks him up. She comes from this lowland tribe, and they're more advanced. Later on the movie goes on and on, and they fall in love. It's great. Real nice costumes. Incredible Swiss mountain scenery, and good music. In fact, Luke Gasser is the hero, scriptwriter, and director of the movie. Him and I wrote the songs for the soundtrack called "On My Own", and Doro sings with us, so it's a heavy metal trio because Luke also has a band, a rock band. I even did other parts of the soundtrack, which medicine man kind of chanting, and this goes on throughout the first part of the movie. So I'm quite involved with it, and I enjoyed it. I'd do something like that again, for sure. Yeah. I would.

Rock My Monkey: Have you heard any news on if "Anuk" is going to get released in America on DVD at all? Because I have looked, and there's no news on it.

Marc Storace: No. It's too early. We have a premiere-the world premiere is on the 11th, this Saturday, and I've got to rush to a KROKUS concert after that, which is about 70 or 90 kilometers away. And then it hits the cinemas on the 16th of November. It's in German. It's not in dialect, Swiss German. So it should be out in Germany, and in Austria, too, because that's where they speak German, too. And hopefully this is going to be translated into English too, and shipped over to the USA. But I guess they'll wait and see how the box office in Europe runs first. That's the usual way they do things. We have to wait up to three months to see a new movie which is released in the USA. Before it hits Europe.

Check out the entire interview in text and MP3 format at www.rockmymonkey.com.