When the camera focuses on Ron Perlman, it captures, with clarity, the sum of his distinguished parts - the lantern jaw, the deep-set eyes and the high, square forehead.
Perlman is 1.88m, which hardly conveys the berth he has occupied on-screen over the years, in movies such as 1982's Quest for Fire, where he played a Neanderthal, and 1995's surrealist French film City of Lost Children, where he was a tender circus strong man.
The movies, though, have exaggerated his features, so much so that you half-expect to be be lunching with a giant.
While physically imposing, the actor is not, technically, huge.
Wearing jeans and an untucked shirt, Perlman made his way to the table with a slight limp, the result of a broken toe he suffered on the Budapest, Hungary, set of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which opened in the US at No1 at the box office and opens here on August 28.
It has been Perlman's semi-obscure fate to exist, on camera, under layers of carefully applied grotesquerie.
This includes the TV series Beauty and the Beast, which gave him a kind of folk fame 20 years ago.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army - in which Perlman battles a vengeful prince of darkness, a mammoth troll, flesh-eating tooth fairies and that hellacious army of the title - required three hours in the make-up chair on a good day, Perlman said, six hours on other days.
But one senses that Perlman has finally found all the artifice to be liberating.
No other role has gotten to the core of his personality - or done nearly so much for his career - as Hellboy, the benevolent but churlish demon with a blue-collar ethos and freak-show brawn, first shepherded from the pages of Mike Mignola's graphic novels to the big screen in 2004 by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro.
It was Perlman's physical resemblance to the comic book Hellboy - the heavy brow, angular head and imposing presence - that made him an ideal muse for the director.
And with Hellboy II: The Golden Army, del Toro, riding the wave of his Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth, seems even freer to mine the dichotomy of his main character.
The Hellboy legend is a nurture-over-nature paradigm.
Hellboy, after all, should have been all evil - brought to Earth by Nazi occultists to be an agent of doom, only to end up working for the good guys at a top-secret government hideout (it's in New Jersey) in the battle against paranormal malevolence.
As Perlman said of the character: "He's basically just a flailing mass of sentiment and emotion."
Which is why, in Hellboy II, amid all of del Toro's signature monsters, there is a rather remarkable scene in which Hellboy, having had a row with Liz, stands mournfully in the shower, beer in hand, as the Eels song Beautiful Freak scores the scene.
"I get chills up my spine thinking about my first reaction to the emotional world that Guillermo explores," Perlman said.
"I have trouble capturing his true genius. Because it's so unique and so much unlike what anybody else is grappling with, in any form of culture.
"You see Guillermo continuing to use kind of the same set pieces and grapple with what is truly monstrous, and it always has this juxtaposition of the conventional human versus the conventional creature/monster - and what is truly monstrous."
Perlman (58) is, to be sure, the summer's most unusual comic-book action star, amid a season in which Robert Downey Jun is Iron Man, and the combo platter of Christian Bale and the late Heath Ledger are the stars of The Dark Knight.
He is, by contrast, a child of New York in the 1950s who at 14 had already reached his adult height and weighed 130kg.
That feeling of outsider-ness no doubt contributed to his fast friendship with del Toro, a comic-book aficionado who waited out seven years of studio scepticism about the idea of Perlman as the Hellboy lead, taking development meetings with a clay sculpture of Perlman as the character.
The two first met in the early 1990s, when del Toro, then a fledgling horror director with a costume-effects business in Mexico City, sent Perlman a flattering letter, hoping he would agree to be in his first film, the 1993 low-budget and creepy Cronos.
Del Toro's letter happened to catch Perlman at one of a series of fallow points in his career, when he was wondering if he should leave Los Angeles and move his family back to New York.
Today, Perlman says, his career is exactly as he imagined it would be.
"Hellboy II has to be a watershed experience for me," Perlman said.
"I'm starting to see the mainstream part of Hollywood finally include me in their discussions."
To wit: The menacing crucifix tattoo these days decorating the actor's neck is fake - a body prop for a new TV series called Sons of Anarchy, in which Perlman stars as the leader of a Hell's Angel gang trying to keep the town of Charming, well, "charming".
He will also co-star with Josh Hartnett and Demi Moore in Bunraku, young Israeli director Guy Moshe's upcoming action-fantasy based on a form of Japanese puppet theatre.
And then there is the possibility, no doubt, of Hellboy III, by which time Perlman will have hit 60 - a demonising age in Hollywood, though Hellboy's dealt with worse. - Paul Brownfield
Hellboy II: The Golden Army opens in New Zealand cinemas on August 28.
