“Martha. I recorded a song called Martha. It was on my Welcome to the Neighbourhood album.”
I am sitting on the Vancouver set of Ghost Wars, a new Syfy/Netflix series, when the actor who’s just shot an ennui-filled scene sits down beside me.
I introduce myself, already knowing who he is.
It’s Meat Loaf, whose Bat Out of Hell album came out during my second year of high school. That was a long time ago for each of us and we’re both showing signs of aging. My teenaged self knew the words to most of the album’s songs but today I’d flub a Carpool Karaoke. He’s had spinal fusion surgery and moves as tentatively as my memory.
We’re not scheduled to have an interview but he starts talking about the song Martha, and how it broke his heart to record it. I can’t help asking him about the connection between singing and acting and, suddenly, a conversational chat turns into this story.
As music producer Rob Carvallo once said, “Meat Loaf is an actor who believes he can sing.”
“And that’s basically the truth,” Meat Loaf concurs.
Every time he sings a song, he’s in character — not as Meat Loaf the performer, but as the person the song is about. So when he sings Martha, Tom Waits’ plaintive ballad, he’s the middle-aged man calling his former flame — you know it’s in the middle of the night, probably after having a few lonely drinks while his wife is asleep upstairs — in hopes of rekindling a love lost. It hurts.
When he’s Doug, a central character in Ghost Wars, and shoots the scene where he opens the door to an attic bedroom, you don’t need a soundtrack to queue “suspenseful mood.” You know that he’s revealing an emotionally exposed side of his character.
“I’m hurting [physically] all the time except when I’m Doug. When I’m Doug I don’t feel any pain,” says Meat Loaf, who’s called Meat on the set. (He was born Marvin Lee Aday, later changing his first name to Michael; Meat Loaf was his football coach’s nickname for the hefty player.)
His approach is to let his unconscious self free. “It will do a lot more than your conscious level ever will,” he says. With each role, he gives himself a trigger to leave Meat Loaf behind and become the character. To switch into Doug, he flicks his ears with his thumbs and bows his head. “If my mind is not in Doug’s world, I go back and start again.”
He’s still angry at himself for the one time he was Meat Loaf when the cameras were rolling. It was during filming of a scene in the 1987 Michael Keaton movie, The Squeeze. “Meat,” the director told him, “we just need you to open the door, cross the room and go through that door.”
“I walked across the room as Meat Loaf and it’s driven me crazy ever since,” the actor says. “Now I know never to cross the room as Meat Loaf. At the time, I didn’t know better.”
Meat Loaf got his acting start in the Los Angeles production of Hair but it was the 1975 movie Rocky Horror Picture Show that made Meat Loaf famous. He played Eddie, the ex-delivery boy who drives his motorcycle out of a deep freeze on and, after getting everyone to dance to “Hot patootie, bless my soul, I really love that rock ’n’ roll,” meets an unfortunate end with an ice pick.
Although none of the musical’s songs are from Bat Out of Hell, the two became indelibly linked when the producer allowed Meat Loaf’s video recording of Paradise by the Dashboard Life, a song on the album, to run before the midnight screenings of the flop that soon became a cult favourite. Today, the album has sold more than 44 million copies.
Meat Loaf was enjoying his return to Vancouver. The inaugural season of Ghost Wars, which will eventually come to Netflix, was shot at the old post office sorting facility in downtown Vancouver as well as Fort Langley and Squamish. However, this was his first time back to the city since his back surgery. “I liked it a lot better before because I could go out and walk.”
For now, he was content to focus on how he was going to walk across that stage set, all the pains of the world forgotten when he put his hands behind his ears, bowed his head and became Doug.
