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The "hello" on the other end of the line sounded decidedly groggy.
No, Eric Mabius claimed, he wasn't asleep, but he hadn't talked yet that Sunday. Clearly, although it was early afternoon in Utah where he was staying, the call had missed waking the former Amherst resident by minutes.
It was his only day off from filming "The Crow: Salvation" that week, he explained, and one can hardly blame the actor for taking it easy. His days on the set for this second sequel to "The Crow" are grueling. Mabius plays the main character, who is framed for murder and executed, then comes back to life and fights, knifes, shoots and wreaks havoc on those responsible for his death.
One day he hurled a lead pipe at a fellow actor. On another he was fitted with 14 squibs, small explosive charges used to simulate bullet hits on a body.
"It was my first time being squibbed," he said enthusiastically.
It's a long way from the days he played Paris in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" at Amherst Regional High School. Paris is a character notable mainly for being Romeo's last victim before he commits suicide. That first role came his way when Mabius, now 27, was a sophomore. In the dozen years since, Mabius has racked up a string of roles on film and television, including the indie movie hit "Welcome to the Dollhouse." Most recently, he had a guest-starring role on an episode of "Millennium," and he can be seen currently on the silver screen in "Cruel Intentions."
Just as Mabius' character will be resurrected in "The Crow," so, he hopes, will the series find new life.
This dark fantasy, based on a comic book published in Northampton by the now-defunct Kitchen Sink Press, took wing in 1994. That first film, starring Bruce Lee's son Brandon Lee, who died tragically during filming, made $100 million on the strength of the story and star Lee's final performance.
Filmmakers thought they had a surefire hit in the sequel, "The Crow: City of Angels," which starred Vincent Perez. Though it opened well, this film failed to approach its predecessor's status.
Now, Miramax Studios hopes the series will soar again with "The Crow: Salvation." The burden of those hopes rests in part on the shoulders of Mabius, who discovered his love of acting on the stage at Amherst Regional High.
"The soundtrack's gone multiplatinum, VHS sales are 2 million in the U.S. alone, and it's a $100 million franchise. It's staggering," he said. "To follow in the footsteps of Brandon Lee is no easy task."
Growing as an actor
The Mabius family, which includes Eric, his older brother, Craig, and parents Elizabeth and Craig Mabius, moved to Amherst when Eric was in ninth grade.
The following year, remembers teacher John Warthen, Mabius took an oral communications class. Warthen, who taught the course, recalls that Mabius really liked getting up in front of the class to do public speaking. Warthen suggested to him that he might enjoy acting.
Later that year, Mabius played the role of Paris in "Romeo and Juliet."
He was instantly hooked.
"It was like a virus," he recalled in a Gazette interview in 1995.
Warthen was impressed by Mabius' enthusiasm and talent.
"He liked assuming the part. He has a romantic nature. He can get into the mindset of something being the most important thing at the time," Warthen said, a skill that helped Mabius in his acting.
Mabius was also an athlete during his time at the high school - he trained seriously in luge for many years - and his athletic build got him a lot of tough guy and regular guy roles in those days, Warthen said. Mabius always seemed to be amused at playing these macho roles.
After he graduated in 1989, Mabius went to Sarah Lawrence College, near New York City, where he lived for several years after graduating. While in the city, he began acting on stage and screen. His first major film role was in John Duigan's "The Journey of August King."
Last year, he went west to Santa Monica and moved his parents to Los Angeles, too.
Mabius, who is single, will have quite a bit to tell his former high school classmates should he make it to his 10-year reunion this year. In 1995, he received good reviews for his work in groundbreaking director Todd Solondz's "Welcome to the Dollhouse," as hunky Steve, the object of nerdy Dawn Wiener's affections. In addition to "The Journey of August King," he also had a role in Duigan's "Lawn Dogs."
A role in the television series "Millennium" came his way recently through his work on "The Crow: Salvation." Chip Johannessen, who wrote the script for "Crow," created a part especially for him in the Jan. 15 episode of the TV show.
Mabius played a mysterious man who always seems to be around when people die. Investigators suspect him of being a killer. Eventually, it becomes clear that he's taking people's lives in exchange for others, said Mabius, who described the character as part angel of mercy, part angel of death, who's on a sort of mission.
"I earn my wings," he said.
Warthen, who saw the episode, liked it and was particularly impressed with the last five minutes of the piece, which had Mabius underwater. Holding one's breath and acting, Warthen pointed out, are not easy to do.
Larger than life
Currently, Mabius can be seen in theaters in "Cruel Intentions," where he has a small part as a closeted gay football player manipulated by a pair of scheming step-siblings. It is a teen version of "Dangerous Liaisons" that stars Sarah Michelle Gellar of television's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and Ryan Phillippe of "54."
Mabius said the finished film lacks the cruelty that drew him to the original script.
"It was a teen piece, but the writing was vicious and wicked," he said. "They ended up toning down a lot of the writing."
His character, Greg McConnell, is blackmailed into helping Ryan Phillippe's Sebastian with his nasty plot to seduce a virginal new girl at their school.
In one scene, he's caught in bed with a man by Phillippe. In the version seen onscreen, the exchange is verbal, with Greg pleading for mercy while Sebastian threatens him. In the original version Sebastian physically attacked Greg and taunted him, heightening the emotion of the moment.
"It was so good. I wish they hadn't cut that," Mabius said.
The filmmakers, feeling that the audience wouldn't accept something bad happening to a nice character, also added a scene to make Greg less appealing, in which he graphically describes a sexual experience with a girl.
"I appear to be a rapist in the making," Mabius said.
He hopes that people interpreted it as he did, as the football player's clumsy bluff to hide his true sexual orientation.
A new crow takes flight
Although "Cruel Intentions" is out now, Mabius' head is in an entirely different universe these days. For the past six weeks he's been in Salt Lake City, Utah, shooting "The Crow: Salvation." He expects to be there another month.
Utah has been an experience, he said.
"It's one big church. The state is ruled by Mormons. It's a different feeling. People complain about the blue laws in Massachusetts. Here, stores are closed on Sundays, at 6 p.m. on weekdays - and then there's me, walking around with my demonic mask," he said, bemused over the paradox.
"The Crow: Salvation" is a grim tale.
"It's the eve of my 21st birthday, and I'm on death row. I've been framed for the murder of my girlfriend," he explained.
Mabius refers to the characters he plays in the first person, a habit that is jarring when he discusses "his" botched execution.
"My face melts and I eventually die," he said.
His innocence and gruesome death are important elements in Johannessen's script.
"It's a neat anti-capital punishment statement he slides in there," Mabius said.
After the character's death, the myth of the crow kicks in.
"If a soul is left in a violent, unsettled state, it can't rest," he said. That's when the crow appears "to act as usher," and help the soul right the wrongs done to it.
There's an image of a taxidermist mounting a crow, and as he puts the last piece in place, Mabius' character comes back to life, gruesomely disfigured and with a face bearing the scars of the execution. With the help of his girlfriend's younger sister (Kirsten Dunst, of "ER" and "Interview with a Vampire"), Mabius' character unravels the conspiracy that led to his death.
Unlike the main characters in the other "Crow" pictures, this character doesn't know at first what's happened to him or what new supernatural powers he possesses.
"In the other 'Crows,' the powers don't take (the characters) much by surprise," Mabius said. His character, though, "is like a kid with a new toy" when he discovers his strength and his empathic powers, something Mabius thinks is a more realistic conception of how a person might react to such unusual gifts.
Mabius is a little like that, reveling in the physical demands of the role, for which he's doing "as much (stunt work) as I can safely get away with."
It won't be him leaping from the rafters or crashing through plate glass, but he did train for weeks with a martial artist to learn the rudiments of kicking and knife-fighting, and described in detail one stunt that had him defending himself against a phalanx of attackers.
This is Mabius' first supernatural thriller and one of his biggest roles to date, and the hiring process was tortuous.
He met with a casting director, with producer Ed Pressman (who also has producer credits for "Badlands" and "Platoon," among others), and director Bharat Nalluri, an Indian making his American debut with this film. They liked him, but officials at Miramax needed convincing that they should cast Mabius instead of a name actor.
Ultimately, however, Mabius got the part.
"The whole process took five weeks," Mabius said. "It almost drove me nuts. Every actor thinks they're the best qualified (for a part), and when you live with something for that long, it seems so wrong for them not to choose you."
According to Warthen, people who knew him when he was just starting out will root for him every time.
"Everybody who knows him has kept an eye out for him with a smile, because whatever he gets, he probably earned," Warthen said.