UFC fighter Rich Franklin, who stars in the straight-to-DVD SF movie Cyborg Soldier, told SCI FI Wire that he was surprised how many emotions he had to keep in check. Franklin plays I.S.A.A.C., a super-secret military experiment in engineering the ultimate human weapon.
"You think that acting as a cyborg-type character, somebody that has a lack of emotion, would be easier, but it's not," Franklin said in a phone interview on Oct. 2. "There are other emotions, even if you don't have to produce a crying scene in a movie, which may be a difficult thing for me to do. There are other emotions, like anger or sarcasm, that normally I would portray in real life that you can't do on screen either, because that's not part of your character. It makes it difficult."
In the movie, I.S.A.A.C. breaks free of the military facility that engineered him and fights off the commandos sent to retrieve him. I.S.A.A.C.'s moves may be familiar to fans of Franklin's UFC bouts.
"I had some influence on a couple of the fight scenes," he said. "Other than maybe [learning to] do some things that look a little better on camera, there wasn't a whole lot of difference between what I.S.A.A.C. would do and what I would do."
Only one action sequence forced Franklin into an unfamiliar fighting style. "There was one scene in the movie that was a knife fight. There was a lot of point-style fighting. Learning the choreography for that was much different, because the movement for that was just different than the way that I'm used to moving, that kind of point, touch and go type. [It's] more of a kung fu style, I guess."
For his first movie, Franklin had not intended to be the star. The filmmakers convinced him that he was the perfect cyborg soldier. "I don't have any kind of background in drama or anything like that," he said. "At least to step into a new industry like this, I was looking for just a small part in something, just to try it out more than anything else. This was just much larger than I thought it was going to be."
Cyborg Soldier DVD drops in stores Oct. 7.
-Fred Topel
