Zebadiah Devane

Zebadiah Devane is one of the British Horror Studio’s most energetic and unpredictable character actors, a performer of wild spirit, comic force and fearless physical commitment. California born and raised in Alaska, he brings something restless, adventurous and volcanic to the screen: a chaotic intensity that can suggest humour, menace, pathos or grotesque transformation, sometimes all within the same role.

There is something of the Danny DeVito spirit in his work: compact, combustible, darkly funny and unafraid to appear strange, ugly, ridiculous or dangerous in pursuit of a character. Devane is not a performer who stands apart from the dirt, blood, costume and practical effects of horror cinema. He throws himself into them, embracing heavy make-up, creature work, physical discomfort and heightened theatricality with rare enthusiasm.

Within the British Horror Studio, that fearlessness has made him a true dark chameleon. In Amicus Production's In the Grip of Terror, he plays Greg, an amusing and neurotic patient who dreams of escaping a cursed hospital and returning to his native Alaska; a ruthless preacher from the New World in the eighteenth-century Gothic romance Sawney; Tobin Wells, a sleazy journalist and media operative in the forthcoming follow-up to Spoiling You; and, most notoriously, a seven-foot hooved faun monster in The Slave and the General.

Across these roles, Devane is often almost unrecognisable, disappearing into costumes, prosthetics, accents, grotesques and extremes of behaviour. His work represents the anarchic edge of the studio’s repertory: risk-taking, physically inventive, wickedly comic and willing to transform completely in service of the nightmare.