Over the years, Terence Stamp has transformed from Angry Young Man of British Cinema to Living Symbol of Swinging Sixties London to Occasional Blockbuster Filler Material Paycheck-Casher to Grand Old Man of the Silver Screen. But one thing has remained constant: he's a hell of a fun interview.
The Collider managed to track him down at the premiere of the Get Smart big-screen adaptation, and, in discussing everything from working with Tom Cruise to working on Yes Man with Jim Carrey to his classic role as General Zod in Superman II, he's as engaging as ever. In discussing the problem-plagued Valkyrie, Cruise's WWII epic, Stamp plays it pretty close to the vest, just before launching into a rather odd story about being invited to a Tom Cruise rave.
Our favorite anecdote, though, is the one where Stamp more or less takes direct responsibility for the moral decline of Western civilization since 1980: "I hadn't worked in about 10 years when I got the Superman offer, and I was very nervous because it was apparent that they just wanted, like, an ugly. And I had the feeling that they were going to just like me ugly, and dress me ugly, and give me ugly stuff to say. And I had a friend at the time -- he was a baron, a Dutch baron, he was called Frederick von Pallandt and he was a very wise guy. He was a bit older than me. And I said, 'I'm having doubts about this.' And he said, 'You shouldn't really have doubts about it, because for loads of kids, Superman movies will be the first movie they ever go to see. And by the time they grow up, there'll be more people who want to be more people who want to be Zod than Superman. So you really shouldn't worry about it. You should just be as ugly and as horrible as you can be.' And it kind of came to pass, you know."
