THE BIZ

There are times when an actor can get too far into a role. Just ask the unsuspecting priest who ran into actor Lance Henriksen on a street in Rome earlier this year. Henriksen, grizzled and bald for his portrayal of Spanish torturer Torquemada in Stuart Gordon’s upcoming “The Pit and the Pendulum,” had taken a day off. But after two months of frenetic slicing and dicing, he couldn’t shake the feelings of violence and hatred necessary for the part. Seeing a priest, for him a symbol of the Spanish Inquisition in which thousands were tortured and executed, Henriksen went over the top. “I started screaming at him,” recalls Henriksen, 47. “I was looking for a stick or a rock to hit him with.” The priest, horrified, ran away.

This is not the first time Henriksen has taken method acting to extremes. For his role as a biker chieftain in this year’s “Stone Cold,” he built his own hog and joined a South Texas gang called the Banditos. For his breakthrough part as the artificial person, Bishop, in “Aliens,” he envisioned himself not as a machine but as a South African miner “who knows he can be replaced in a minute.”

Henriksen reprises his role as Bishop in 20th Century Fox’s upcoming “Alien III.” At the end of “Aliens,” there was little left of Bishop; it would have been a short return performance had he not been called on to play Bishop’s creator as well. Henriksen found these roles more peaceful than Torquemada. “I am the only one with hair (in “Aliens III),” he says. “Everyone else, including Sigourney (Weaver), is bald.”