PopHorror Let's Get Scared
One thing you will never find me doing is attending, holding or being in any part of a seance. They’re all cool in theory, like a Ouija Board, but I am way too scared of opening a portal and letting out some bat-shit crazy, pissed off spirit. Ain’t nobody got time for that. Unfortunately, the characters in Pamela Moriarty’s A Deadly Legend (read our review here) don’t agree, and well … I don’t want to give it away, but I was lucky enough to speak with Actor Corbin Bernsen (L.A. Law TV series, Psych TV series), the local crystal dealer in the movie, and we talked about how he became an actor, what draws him to horror, and of course, horror movies.
PopHorror: What was it about A Deadly Legend that made you want to be a part of it?
Corbin Bernsen: First and foremost, I had just moved up to the Hudson River Valley and heard there was a burgeoning film community there. So I let it be known that I was around, and if anybody wanted an actor, I was available. I got a call the next day, literally.
PopHorror: Oh, wow!
Corbin Bernsen: To my surprise, I got this wonderful script for A Deadly Legend. I’ve always been attracted to sci-fi. I personally don’t ever direct or write sci-fi, and I like to be a little bit more in control. Sometimes, sci-fi scripts … you look at them and just hope that everybody else is going to do a good job in post-production, special effects and all that, because so much of it depends on all of that. But I was attracted to the story and the character. After the initial excitement of doing a movie up near where I lived, I liked the story. It’s not a new story, but it’s one that’s well told about people that wanted to develop a certain amount of land that has a history and a legend, and if you disturb the earth, bad things will happen.
PopHorror: Looks like they were excited to have you there if you got a call the next day. Didn’t take any time at all!
Corbin Bernsen: Literally, it was the next day. Literally, I had just told the film commission that I’m around here, and Judd Hirsch—who is an old buddy of mine—and Lori Petty were both in the film, so that’s a good start.
PopHorror: You have quite an impressive resume, and you’ve dabbled in almost every genre. What draws you to horror?
Corbin Bernsen: Horror and sci-fi, it’s the stuff that … there’s a certain intangible … you can’t touch and see and feel. A quality to it. You just don’t know. You don’t really understand the mystery of it all. We tend to want to try to calendar it up … Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday … We want to make sense of it all, but it’s an interesting thing when you get involved with a project or a story that sense and logic don’t get you to where you want to go. I’m not talking about the structure of the story. I’m talking about a world where things like sci-fi things happen. Horror happens. And it’s fun to explore when it’s not just a love story between a guy and a girl. I like visiting that place that we don’t want to visit because of the unknowns.
PopHorror: What made you want to become an actor?
Corbin Bernsen: Oh, wow! That’s going way back. My mother was an actress on The Young and the Restless for many, many years. It was in my family, and I watched her. Basically, by the time I got to 19, I figured that was the life I wanted. Pretty much that was it. Watching her, at first I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do anything like my parents, but then of course, as time went on, I just realized it was in my blood and in my family, so I gave over.
PopHorror: If you didn’t go into acting, what do you think you’d be doing?
Corbin Bernsen: Well, I love building. I love carpentry. I love big building, not like a furniture-maker carpenter, but I like building things. And I love lighting. So somewhere between those two, probably.
PopHorror: That’s fun! I know with Covid going on, most things have been shut down, but is there anything that you’re currently working on, or have coming up?
Corbin Bernsen: The Psych movie just came out last week on Peacock. It’s a TV series I was on. That’s out now on Peacock streaming. I wrote a novel during the course of this. I’m constantly reworking it. And I’m writing a series. A potential series.
PopHorror: That’s exciting! Kept yourself busy writing a novel.
Corbin Bernsen: Yeah, finished it about a week ago. Now I have the harder task of making sure it makes sense.
PopHorror: What genre is it?
Corbin Bernsen: It’s like sci-fi but not sci-fi really. It’s like a fake memoir. Not a memoir about me, it’s not that. It falls into a psychological thriller.
PopHorror: I like that! I have one last question for you, and that is: what is your favorite scary movie?
Corbin Bernsen: I like The Shining because it’s scary, but it has that humor, that humor that Jack Nicholson brings to it. Not stupid humor. I don’t like scary movies that are funny. And the one that creeped me out the most when I was younger was The Exorcist.
