After a unique beginning in the New York City improv scene, Graham Skipper has quickly established himself as a popular and dependable horror genre actor, grounding his characters’ terrifying circumstances in the solid stability of the everyman. I got a chance to interview him recently, and I think I drooled on my keyboard a tiny bit since I’ve been a fan of his for years now. Check it out, kids!

UNCLE MIKE: Thanks a lot for agreeing to the interview. I’m going to try to make this as little “fan boy” as possible, but I’ve just been a huge fan of yours for a number of years now.

GRAHAM SKIPPER: Oh, man, thanks so much, I really appreciate that.

UM: You’re welcome! I first saw you in Re-Animator The Musical at the Steve Allen [Theatre] and immediately went home and watched a bunch of FUCTNYC videos and totally fell in love with your style.

GS: (laughs) Well, you’ve definitely seen a side of me that few have seen. Yeah, FUCT was a huge part of my life in New York, and I’m glad it’s lived on through the horror community now.

UM: It definitely has. Can you give me a little bit of background, like where you were born and such?

GS: Yeah, I come from Fort Worth, Texas, and I went to college at Fordham University in New York City, and I lived in New York for about ten years, and that was where I did a lot of theatre, especially a lot of sketch comedy through my comedy troupe FUCT.  And it was through my work there that I got to know George Wendt, who was the one who ended up connecting me to Stuart Gordon, and then I got into Re-Animator The Musical, and now I’m getting to live my dream of being a horror movie actor. It’s pretty surreal and pretty awesome.

UM: You know I was going to bring that up, because with your list of credits, with Almost Human, and Carnage Park and Mind’s Eye and Tales of Halloween and all that, you’ve kind of become almost the go-to guy for the horror genre. Have you always been a fan?

GS: Always. My whole life. One of my favorite books of all time is Bruce Campbell’s book If Chins Could Kill, and that should give you an idea of the reverence that I have for him and other actors in the horror genre that really have taken it seriously and created a life for themselves out of that. You know, Robert Englund, Jeffrey Combs, Kane Hodder, Bill Moseley, all the greats. Those were the guys I grew up watching obsessively. I was the one of my friends that, you know, we never went to Halloween parties. I made them build a haunted house so we could scare trick-or-treaters.  I was the guy who always brought the horror movie to our slumber parties, and introduced my friends to The Exorcist and Dawn of the Dead and Evil Dead 2 and all of those movies. So I’ve always been a big horror nerd, and have always had a tremendous amount of respect for the artists that make it.  I’m an equal-opportunity consumer of it. I love Basket Case as much as I love Rosemary’s Baby.  I’ve always thought, “I want to do movies, I want to be an actor, I want to do memorable stuff,” and now I’m getting to do all that in the genre that I love.  And I love being in it. There’s nothing quite like just being covered in blood on a hot day and being surrounded by people that all want to be there too. It’s amazing.

UM: Besides Bruce Campbell, do you have any heroes, performing or otherwise, that you look up to?

GS: Gosh, Clive Barker is a big inspiration to me. I really love his work and I really love that fact that he’s always being one hundred percent true to himself, even in the face of studio meddling with Nightbreed. He’s not somebody that has allowed himself to be shoehorned into anything.  He just creates and he creates at an incredible pace.  I think as far as performers–I think Robert Englund is an absolute genius who deserves a lot more credit than he gets for his contribution to culture and film. I think that his performance as Freddy is absolutely one of the most iconic performance of all time in any genre.  I think the same thing of Boris Karloff. You watch his work in Frankenstein and you see somebody who has totally mastered the art of stillness and pathos.  Peter Lorre, there’s another actor I look up to. His biography, The Lost One, you should read it, it’s amazing.  I look up to those guys so much because, again, I think I respect an artist who is able to take material that some might find silly or that some might find below them or something, and really take the time and the energy to turn it into something beautiful and lasting. And obviously outside of the horror genre, like Mark Hamill I think is one of the great actors of all time.

UM: Wow.

GS: Not just for Luke Skywalker. Although I will say I think that his performance in the Star Wars trilogy oddly kind of underrated. I think they look at Harrison Ford because he went on to become this huge A-lister, but people don’t really think about how Mark Hamill really holds that trilogy together.

UM: Oh yeah.

GS: And, of course, as the Joker. Talk about somebody who reinvented a character that has been reinvented so many times and somehow he’s still, in my mind, on top.

UM: I just saw The Killing Joke last night. That was amazing.

GS: Oh, I’m so jealous!

UM: They added a little bit in the beginning with Batgirl that wasn’t in the comic book, but, man, both him and [Kevin] Conroy are just amazing in that.  So, I just saw The Mind’s Eye recently, and I saw Almost Human last year. You’ve worked with the director Joe Begos twice now, what do you like about working with him?

GS: Joe and I have a really easy shorthand. We’re both big fans and we both like the same movies. We’re friends outside of making movies anyway, so I think it just allows us to be totally, instantly on the same page as each other. He can give me a direction like, “I want this to look like so-and-so’s entrance from Nightmare 3, ” and I’ll go, “Oh, yeah, got it.”  It just makes the work flow fast and easy and fun, and I think we both enjoy it in the same way, and we both take it seriously in the same way, so there’s never any sort of friction there.  It’s always a partnership of two people moving towards the same goal. And, like I said, we’re friends, too, and who doesn’t want to work with their friends?

UM: He certainly likes covering you in blood.

GS: He sure does. He likes abusing me.  That’s why we talk about Bruce Campbell all the time. I trust Joe immensely, and so I’ll do whatever he says because I know that he’s going to do right by me in the final product.  It’s like kids who go outside and play in the mud, we just get to play in snow and blood.

UM: Please, please, please tell me about Space Clown. I already want to see the movie just from the name.

GS: (laughs) Yeah, Space Clown, something like three years ago I had a camera and I said, “I just want to make something totally ridiculous,” in the vein of like the 90s Troma movies that I really loved. And so I got a few friends together and over the course of about a week practically in my backyard. It’s still not out yet, it’s been a slow process.  It wasn’t made with a commercial intent in mind, it was just made to make something fun and ridiculous and absurd. But, it’s done, and I’ve been trying to talk to folks about trying to get it out in the world somehow, so, hopefully, you’ll be able to see it.

UM: Are you interested in doing more directing and writing, or sticking with acting for the future?

GS: Absolutely, in fact I just wrapped production on a feature that I wrote and directed called Sequence Break. This one is a big movie, we’ve really gone all out with it.  It stars Chase Williamson from John Dies At The End and Fabianne Therese from Southbound and Starry Eyes and a bunch of films, as well as a whole cast of amazing people. It’s sort of a metaphysical sci-fi horror film in the vein of Videodrome. Just lots of Cronenbergian biomechanical hallucinations and things like that.  It’s super cool, we just wrapped production and we’re in post right now, and hopeful that soon there will be some news about when people can start to see it.  We want to get it out to the world as quickly as possible.

UM: Oh, man, that sounds great. I’m really looking forward to that one too!

GS: You know, to maybe more accurately answer your question about whether or not I want to keep directing, on the one hand obviously yes, I do, because I did this. But, I think as much as anybody in this industry, I just want to create cool stuff.  There’s a part of me that wants to keep acting and making other peoples’ stuff come to life and playing in all these different worlds, which is what I love about acting in the first place.  And then there’s the other part of me that wants to create my own stories.  I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve had the opportunity to do that. Sequence Break is a great example of just being surrounded by other people with a like-minded sensibility that are moving towards that same goal and just want to make awesome stuff too.  I’m really really excited by it.  It’s going to be pretty special.

UM: Just to bring it all around full circle for me, personally, I know you’ve been working on a Re-Animator [The Musical] soundtrack–can you give us any idea of when it will be available? Please? Please?

GS: Ah, I wish I could.  I don’t have any information about that whatsoever.  But, we are done recording it, so I know that they’re working on it right now to make it all perfect and put it all together. Rest assured, I’ll definitely let everybody–I know that word will get out as soon as we know the date. I hope sooner rather than later because I’m excited to get it into peoples’ hands.

UM: Graham thank you so much for doing this interview. We appreciate it and look forward to seeing more of your work.

GS: Yeah, man. Totally!

Again, a very huge HorrorBuzz thank you to Graham Skipper for taking time out of his very busy schedule to talk to us.  Keep an eye out for him in Carnage Park and Beyond The Gates, releasing soon.

If you are in the neighborhood, The Mind’s Eye is screening tonight Friday, August 5, 2016 at 7:30 pm at the Laemmle’s Playhouse 7.