Vampires Beware! Blade is Back on TV

Having previously appeared in a successful film trilogy and a short-lived live-action TV series, Marvel's Blade has taken the unlikely road from a semi-obscure comic book character to a well-known superhero/vampire hunter highly familiar to the general public. Now, the "Daywalker" returns again, this Friday, when G4 brings the Blade anime series to America.

Harold Perrineau voices Blade in the series, and I had the chance to speak to the Lost alum about taking on the popular character. We also have an exclusive clip from Blade, which you can check out below!

---

IGN TV: It's obviously a dream we all had as a kid to be a superhero, in one form or the other. When you got the call about Blade, was it like, "I've got to do this"?

Harold Perrineau: Exactly. It was exactly that. It was like Blade, a superhero, which is excellent. There aren't a lot of African American superheroes, so that was the other thing. Not that it had to be, it was really great just to get a chance to do it. And I'm never going to be that big and muscular, and so I try and dream about it all the time. So it was great to be able to do the voice and hopefully jump on the action hero bandwagon.


IGN: The story takes Blade to Japan, right?

Perrineau: Yeah, Blade is in Japan. He's actually all over. He goes to Madripoor. He goes to Vietnam, he goes to a bunch of different islands over there. So it's not just Japan. It's really cool because each place has a bit of their own vampire mythology, which is all really different from the American vampire mythologies. So the vampires are a little different, and they turn into different things or come from different things. So that stuff is really, really cool as the exploration; this journey of a place.

IGN: The first Blade movie came out ahead of this kind of insane, vampire explosion we've seen in the past few years, some of which have a much lighter version of vampires than others. Is it exciting to be part of one where it's like, "You've got to kill these suckers"?

Perrineau: [Laughs] Exactly! Even though I am a vampire, I've gotta f***ing kill them all. Exactly."Enough of this s**t!" Yeah, yeah. And at the end, the dude in Twilight, you just get to cut his head off. [Laughs] No, no. I'm sure he's a very nice guy. In a sense it was ahead of the curve not only in those days, but also in the superhero action movies. It was ahead in all that. Now we have all those things. We have a bunch of superheroes like the Avengers and all that stuff, and a ton of vampire stuff. And Blade was before all those things. So yeah, it is kind of cool to kind of be affiliated with that kind of a thing.

IGN: With the films and people knowing Wesley's performance, was it something you kind of wanted to put to the side, because you wanted to put your own spin on it? Or were you at all influenced by the way Wesley played the character?

Perrineau: Absolutely. I loved the movies back in the day when Wesley did them. I saw them all. I even started watching them again because for me it felt like that's the only way to be Blade. I knew that I could come up with my own spin, but I had to revisit what they had done, because, like you just said, they were really ahead of the curve. They were doing special effects things that didn't get popular until The Matrix, and they were before The Matrix. So there are a bunch of really cool things, and I knew that they had captured some really cool stuff, so I watched them again. Instead of taking it from my memory, I just kind of took it from there and then tried to create a more current spin on Blade. Because he looks a little different than the Wesley Snipes character.