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When filming of Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) wrapped in December, 2007, star Ron Perlman was happy to leave Budapest and return home. He didn't realize that within a year he would be back in Budapest to make Season of the Witch.

This time, however, the 60-year-old actor didn't have to endure hours in the makeup chair, having layers of red latex applied to his face and body to transform him into Hellboy, the surly comic-book demon who has transformed his career. Season of the Witch, a supernatural thriller set in the Middle Ages, would let him show his own face on film.

The film, set for release Jan. 7, casts Perlman as the gruff, straight-talking Felson, a knight who has witnessed years of battle and bloodshed while fighting infidels in the Holy Land. Returning home from the Crusades, Felson and his comrade-in-arms, Behmen (Nicolas Cage), are exhausted and disillusioned. They decide to leave the military, break from the Roman Catholic Church, and go home to their families.

The Europe they remember has been decimated by the Black Death, however. After passing through villages where the population has been wiped out by the epidemic, they arrive at Marburg Palace in Germany. There they are arrested for desertion and brought before the local cardinal (Christopher Lee), who offers to pardon them if they will escort a sorceress accused of being the source of the plague to a remote abbey. There monks will burn her at the stake in the hope of destroying the pestilence that has long ravaged the Continent.

By November, 2008, production on Season of the Witch had moved from Budapest to the remote region of Austria's Totes Gebirge — literally, "Dead Mountains" — where the outdoor shoot was hampered by driving winds, soaking rains, and heavy snow. After each take the cast and crew had to be wrapped in blankets and plied with hot chocolate.

Still, Perlman says, any hardships he endured were outweighed by the chance to experience a new landscape and explore a foreign culture.

 

"For me it's a bonus, getting to live and work in a place for upward of six months at a time that I probably never would get to if I were something other than an actor," he says. "It's a very exotic way to see a place. You're not visiting with a Michelin Guide in hand. Instead you have an apartment of your own. You work with the locals, you're invited to their homes, and you get a sense of what it is like to be Hungarian or to be Austrian."

Already aware of the historical significance of the Crusades when he signed on for the film, Perlman nonetheless immersed himself in literature about the period and learned more about the role of the Catholic Church in 14th-century Europe.

"I felt I needed to get a deep understanding of the time and the place," the actor says, "the difference between spirituality and superstition, and what are the elements that make a period like that possible, where you could create scapegoats so easily for events that aren't explainable, like witchcraft — and then go to great lengths to rid the world of a scourge that is not even a proven entity."

Though each has bounced around Hollywood for almost 30 years, Perlman's previous acquaintance with Cage had been limited to a few superficial greetings in restaurants and at various functions.

"The relationship was started when we both showed up in Budapest," Perlman recalls. "We had some time in preproduction to spend horseback riding and sword-fighting together, and just sitting around a table and discussing what was in the script. I found Nic to be the greatest ‘non-movie-star' movie star I've ever worked with. I don't think that he thinks of himself as [being as] iconic as he actually is.

"He has a great deal of enthusiasm, naivete, and innocence," Perlman says, "and a wide-eyed wonder about how you make these abstract ideas come to life."

The idea of infusing the abstract with vitality was never more central than in the film's climactic scene, set in the soaring scriptorium of a Romanesque abbey, where Behmen and Felson battle a demonic power that has possessed the corpses of a host of monks struck down by the plague.

"In the big fight at the end, with these monks that have been animated by the demon, I was killing a lot of monks that weren't really there," Perlman recalls, adding that in the finished film his "random slashes ... were connecting with actual entities that had been placed there in postproduction. It was pretty seamless."