LAMB OF GOD Frontman Becomes Truly Evil For 'The Graves'

ARTISTdirect.com editor Rick Florino recently conducted an interview with vocalist Randy Blythe of Richmond, Virginia metallers LAMB OF GOD about his role in the horror/thriller "The Graves", which was written and directed by former comic book writer Brian Pulido. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

ARTISTdirect.com: Do you feel like you tap into a similar rhythm on stage and on set?

Blythe: Absolutely! It was definitely a learning experience for me. I'm not going to say by any stretch of the imagination that I'll be up for an Academy Award for my acting [Laughs]. It was a big learning experience, but I definitely got to go to a darker mental place when I was filming the scenes. It required me to think, "Okay, now I'm this totally evil guy. Whatever comes out of me comes out of me, with no regard for anybody else's feelings or safety whatsoever." It's like the lid that society puts on you just gets taken off completely. You're like, "Okay, I'm going to do whatever I want. She needs her throat slit; kill her."

ARTISTdirect.com: Was it really a trip to watch the performance?

Blythe: I've only watched it a couple of times. It's the same thing with our music. Some guys when they get done recording a record, they listen to it relentlessly. I don't. I listen to it once or twice because if I keep on listening to it or, in this case, watching the scene over and over again, I'm going to start criticizing myself really heavily. I'd say, "I could've done this better, that sounds horrible or I look stupid there." Once something is down on wax, there's nothing more that you can do about it, except live with it. I tend to get really critical of myself when I review any sort of material that I've worked on. It was cool to watch for sure though — a couple times. I wouldn't watch it every day or anything [Laughs].

ARTISTdirect.com: Did you have a favorite scene other than the throat-slashing?

Blythe: Yeah, there's a scene in which we're in this abandoned power station that's set up as his church. The two female leads in the movie are tied up, and they're sitting on this low concrete stump. I'm facing them. I was looking at them and intimidating them just for the fun of it. I was looking at one of them and I was thinking about this story that my friend Sammy from GOATWHORE told me. He used to be in a band called ACID BATH, and they had a piece of art by John Wayne Gacy as their album cover for "When the Kite String Pops". ACID BATH was on tour, and they went to visit Gacy in jail. Sammy told me that when he was there it was just really fucked up. He felt that Gacy was looking into him — like looking at him like he was a piece of meat, as if he wanted to eat him. It made Sammy intensely uncomfortable. Even though Gacy was restrained, Sammy met him and he was like, "Wow, this is the real deal. This is a guy who murders people because that's what he has to do — what his inner being compels him to do. If he wasn't over there in chains, he'd probably be eating me right now." During that scene with those two girls, I was thinking about that. I started looking at the girl up and down, like she was a piece of meat. We had to cut. We kept on filming things a million times, and she was like, "You're really creeping me out!" I said, "Good!" [Laughs] I thought the other girl was going to be freaked out and she was like, "Why won't you look at me that way because you're eliciting some sort of fucked up emotional response?" So I did. It was just really fun. In my head, I was thinking horrible, horrible thoughts, making it real. That's kind of neat because you don't get to do that often [Laughs]. Maybe I'm having Freudian slips here or something [Laughs]. You're like, "There's this beautiful woman and I could eat her liver with fava beans and a nice chianti." [Laughs] That was one of my favorite scenes.

ARTISTdirect.com: Would you ever think about writing a book?

Blythe: I'm working on it right now. First of all, I'm working on a graphic novel script. I wrote the introduction awhile back for the second trade volume of a series called DMZ for Vertigo. This guy Brian Wood writes it. I'm a fan of his. Somehow he found out that I liked the series, and his editor approached me about writing the introduction to the second collection. I did, and the editor was like, "That's really good. Have you thought about writing anything yourself?" That put it in my mind to do so. I've been outlining that and world-building right now. I'm outlining a novel right now too. I'm trying to script this graphic novel and outline a regular prose novel at the same time. It might be a little too much. I need to take things off my plate a little bit and do one thing at a time [Laughs]. I do a lot of things at once, but it's what I'd like to do eventually for a living when I'm not doing the LAMB OF GOD thing. I really don't think I'm going to be Mick Jagger, 60-something years-old up there screaming, "Who gives a fuck?!" [Laughs] I don't think my body will take it. Hopefully by that time, I'll settle down into a nice little book life of sorts.

Read the entire interview from ARTISTdirect.com.

Trailer:

Interview with D. Randall Blythe: