Was Oz Perkins, as a kid, aware of what his father did for a living?
“Yes. In the same way a kid whose father is a dentist is aware he goes to work on people’s mouths all day,” he says wryly.
Osgood “Oz” Perkins, currently enjoying acclaim for the superb horror flick Longlegs, appears patiently resigned that he can’t escape questions about his family. He was named for a distinguished grandfather who acted in the first Scarface. His mother, the photographer and actor Berry Berenson, died in the September 11th attacks. And his father was the great Anthony Perkins, star of Orson Welles’s The Trial, Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
“We always went through the back door,” he says. “My dad was always being bothered by this or that person. We lived a rarefied kind of life. People really dug him and really thought he was cool. And I don’t think most people have that experience of their parent.”
It must be a little easier to handle that prying when you have a hit project to discuss. Longlegs, Perkins’s fourth film as director, stars Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage as, respectively, a dogged FBI officer and her serial killer prey. There is much of interest here. Cage is barely recognisable as an ashen satanist with curtains of grey hair. The sound design is unsettlingly sparse. And then there is the conversation with the 1990s. The film is not just set in that decade; it seems to be pondering the era’s cultural touchstones: Twin Peaks, The Silence of the Lambs.
“The early 1990s was extremely formative for me – passing from childhood into something like a stilted adulthood,” Perkins says. “My father died in 1992. That was a strange time as you can imagine. Silence of the Lambs hit us. I was turning 18. All of those things were a perfect storm of that stuff. It was an impactful time for me. Silence of the Lambs is one of those rare things that just lands on you.”
Oz was just eight when he played a younger Norman Bates, the murderous antagonist of Psycho, in the belated first sequel to Hitchcock’s classic
And yet. One of the unavoidable influences on Longlegs is T Rex. Marc Bolan’s definitive glam rock band is referenced in the opening and closing sequences. His photo appears in a significant location. By the year of Perkins’s birth, T Rex were already on the way out. What’s going on there?
“I was sitting down to write Longlegs and that music came to me through this Apple documentary on the music of 1971,” he says. “There was this long section about T Rex and I thought: oh, now’s the time when I’m going to get this stuff. It really worked for me. It felt like a trumpet from the beyond. You should pay attention to this for some reason! If you’re looking to create from an exciting place, you’ve got to listen to those things and not refuse them.”
He felt – correctly, on reflection – that the movie ponders the aesthetic of glam when it “rots a little bit”. He got on to Cage and explained the Bolan of it all.
“It’s not such a stretch to put Cage next to T Rex,” he says, comparing the juxtaposition with David Lynch putting the actor next to Elvis in Wild at Heart.
Cage is going through an interesting time in his career. For the last 15 years or so, countering significant debts, the actor has worked like a demon – knocking up six credits in 2023 alone. Inevitably, there has been much dross in there, but he has also maintained a nose for high-quality oddball entertainment: films such as Pig, Dream Scenario and Mandy. In May, Cannes celebrated his fine performance in Lorcan Finnegan’s Irish co-production The Surfer. He clearly is still putting his shoulder to the wheel. No slacking.
“He is completely invested,” Perkins agrees. “He doesn’t miss a beat. He knows everything you’re talking about. He understands you the first time. If I say he should watch a movie at 10am, at 12.30 he calls back to talk about it. He is a catalogue of movies, movie performances, music, singers, lyrics, poetry, painting. He’s just a really finely tuned machine. And he invests everything that he’s got.”
It is hard to escape the notion that Perkins, who has the sharp, strong features of his sometime matinee-idol dad, was destined to end up in the business called show. Directors and actors were always about the house. He was accustomed to movies putting milk in the fridge and bread on the table. Oz was just eight when he played a younger Norman Bates, the murderous antagonist of Psycho, in the belated (not bad) first sequel to that Hitchcock classic. Did he already have ambitions to act? Or was he just a convenient fit for the role?
“I don’t think I wanted anything besides Star Wars figures and candy,” he says. “Probably someone said: ‘Wouldn’t that be neat?’ And my dad probably said: ‘I don’t see why not.’ And then it sort of rolls downhill a little bit. I wasn’t especially connected to my father in that way. It didn’t feel like ‘bring your son to work’ day. It didn’t feel like: Pops and I are going to do the thing. He was a somewhat remote entity. I don’t remember feeling anything except it being vaguely frightening to be on the set alone at the top of the stairs.”
He talks about Perkins snr being a “remote entity”. There were reasons why he might have seemed such. Throughout much of the actor’s career, the conservative Hollywood system worked to conceal or mutate his homosexuality. Perkins, who had relationships with the actors Tab Hunter and Grover Dale, eventually married Oz’s mum in 1973. “I thought that was just awfully odd behaviour for him,” Don Bachardy, artist and partner of Christopher Isherwood, remarked. “Did he honestly think that marriage to Berry Berenson could make him a heterosexual?”
I wonder how aware Oz and the family were of these complications. Was he surprised to later learn these truths?
“The surprise about it was that it was no surprise. Right?” he says. “The surprise was that we hadn’t been talked to about it. I don’t know who would have that talk. Maybe, even today, I’m not sure how that conversation goes for people whose public lives don’t allow it. I don’t know how that conversation happens with children. I certainly don’t blame anybody. But I do think that a gauze was put over everything – a membrane. Everybody seemed to know it. Certainly all of their friends. It wasn’t like [top agent] Sue Mengers and [top director] Mike Nichols were like: ‘Oh, really? You’re kidding?’”
So he can’t say if things would have been different 20 years later?
“It’s such a weird thing because, even in today’s context, it’s not safe to be that way. It’s still not safe to be gay and a movie star unless you’re going to be a ‘gay movie star’.”
Anthony Perkins died of Aids in September 1992. Almost exactly nine years later, Oz’s mother perished as a passenger in the first plane to strike the World Trade Centre. It is always a wrench to process the death of a parent. It can’t help to have the tragedy part of a news story that causes an entire nation to rock backwards. There is so much noise around your own raw trauma.
“There’s no way to process that,” he says. “There are so many layers of disbelief. It’s very hard to see what it is. The fact that it was for public consumption was very alienating. It didn’t help make us any less angry about it. You’re driving behind a car, and someone’s got a sticker that says ‘9/11, never forget’. You’re like: ‘Okay, I’ll go ahead and never forget. Thanks for the bumper-sticker sentiment. I appreciate that, motherfu**er.’ It’s harder to resolve when there’s a lot of noise in your space.”
Oz Perkins survived. He acted throughout the first decade of the century and made his directorial debut with the acclaimed horror The Blackcoat’s Daughter in 2015. Gretel & Hansel garnered more noise in 2020. And Longlegs now looks to be one of the year’s breakout hits. I wonder if he saw it coming.
“You don’t have enough time,” he says, smiling. “You don’t have enough money. You don’t have enough time. You don’t have enough time. And you do your best for a lot of people. I got to lean on great people.”
Longlegs is in cinemas from July 12th
