Ray Wise has made a career out of playing the villain, most famously in “Twin Peaks” and in an exhaustive list of credits on TV (including “24”) and 90-plus movies including “RoboCop.”
Now he’s starring in the four-part Hulu series “Farmed and Dangerous,” a satirical comedy about the world of industrial agriculture, which premieres Feb. 17.
Wise plays spin doctor Buck Marshall, whose team at the Industrial Food Image Bureau is called in for damage control when the fictional agricultural giant Animoil introduces a petroleum-based animal feed that makes cows explode.
The series is backed by the fast-food chain Chipotle — though there’s no product placement or branding in the show. It’s the next step in the trend of advertising-as-entertainment, though in this case the goal isn’t to push burritos, but to get viewers thinking about where their food comes from.
And though Marshall’s rival is a sustainable farming advocate named Chip (relation to “Chipotle” intended), Wise says the issues “Farmed” brings up are not black and white.
“In this case I’m not so sure who the good guys and the bad guys are,” Wise tells The Post. “There are a lot of important issues about how best to go about feeding a world that has to be fed, and a large part of it that’s starving. There’s good and bad on both sides.”
He says he was attracted to playing a character who gets to toe that line — like Leland Palmer on “Twin Peaks,” who wasn’t a bad guy, but did bad things. (It was eventually revealed that Leland had killed series protagonist Laura Palmer while being inhabited by the soul of a killer named BOB. Don’t ask.)
“He feels a great deal of pride in his work even though he sometimes knows it might not be the right thing to do,” Wise says of Marshall. Besides the character itself, Wise was won over by the witty script, written by Jeremy Pikser (“Bulworth”), Mike Diffenbach (“Less Than Perfect”), Dan Rosenberg (“Inside Man”) and director Tim Piper.
“The Chipotle thing was brought up later. They’ve kept a very small footprint on this whole production,” he says, adding that the company had a rep on set but never interfered with the actors.
But the message of the show appealed to Wise, who liked the idea of taking on an issue like agriculture’s reliance on fossil fuels. “Our show takes that issue and satirizes it to the extreme where [we’re] feeding petroleum directly to livestock. And it’s funny but also it’s not so far outside the realm of possibility,” he says. “It’s just really to get people to start thinking about where their food comes from.”
Wise says the topic provides a wealth of material for a possible second season and he’d “absolutely” return if asked — unsurprising from a guy who says he doesn’t like to go a week without working. In addition to “Farmed,” he’s filmed eight or nine movies in the past year, and is currently doing an arc on “The Young and the Restless” playing — shocker — another bad guy.
“I enjoy it. They’re often the most interesting characters,” Wise says of being typecast as the villain.
“They’re well-written and they get to say a lot of the great lines,” he says. “My own physical appearance sort of lends itself to it I suppose,” he adds with a laugh. “ I have one of those faces.”