It stalks you, drags you down, makes you doubt yourself, traps you in a rut of no ambition, absorbs everything you throw at it. It is the Insecuriac, and it is on the trail of our heroes in this week’s Squaresville:
That’s me as “The Insecuriac”. This is the second of my three appearances in this season of Squaresville – I gather that the third will be in the season finale and that will be the time you see my actual human face, unless Matt replaces it with googly eyes or something.
This was my “Man in Suit” day, the same day we shot the “Star Trek” cosplay bit with me dressed up as The Gorn. “The Ranch”, where we shoot this stuff, isn’t far outside L.A. but it’s still a lot of people and gear to move up the freeway and into the hills, so it’s worked out so far that we go there once a season to get everything we need out of that environment.
It was an especially challenging day for MK and Chrissie, playing the sisters. First, it was a lot of hair and makeup time on a hot day at a location with no structural shelter; just our cars and a pop-up canopy. And this was after MK had already gone through Vulcan makeup. Then, after all the filming up there, we had to strike all the gear and drive to a house in Pasadena for more shooting in the late afternoon and into the night, including the heart-to-heart that ends this episode. After all the physical exertion of the day’s work, to end on something that emotionally-revealing is a real challenge for an actor, and I have a lot of admiration for them for soldiering through it; especially because it wasn’t nearly all they were responsible for that day, they were filming bits for all over the season.
For me, I probably should pretend I didn’t have as much fun as I did, because I got a lot of sympathy over being taped up in all that fur on a hot day. And yeah, I got pretty roasted and thirsty and there were times that breathing was a lot harder than I’m used to, but I guess it reveals something about me that I am still stupid-happy every time I think about having done it. The Insecuriac costume, which we didn’t have a lot of time to put together and basically no time to test, was such a pain with these little slip-on talons that kept slipping off, and the eye holes in the mask were nowhere near my eyes. And then I had to figure out how to move in the thing in ways that looked interesting on-camera.
For that first sighting of me, the whole crew was backed off about fifty yards, so I was just standing alone in this clearing, blind and almost deaf and doing these monster hula moves for about a minute or two straight before they finally realized they were going to have to yell at me that they’d finished rolling. It’s hard to tell, but the hood had this kind of Snuffleupagus snout, and I was encouraged to wave my head to try and get it moving. I don’t think that ever came across.
But I totally intend to protect my turf as Squaresville’s quasi-official “Man in Suit”. Maybe we can get Godzilla into Season 3.
Poached from Squaresville‘s Instagram