"The make-up trailer was the workplace," Jones said.
"The movie I kind of threw in for free."
The 48-year-old Jones, who also plays the Angel of Death and the Chamberlain in the film, puts on bizarre prosthetics the way some of us put on a tie.
The lanky actor arrived in Los Angeles from his native Indiana in 1985 with hopes of being the goofy neighbour in sitcoms.
He became an otherworldly thing instead. Over and over.
A three-year stint doing "Mac Tonight" McDonald's spots as the sunglasses-wearing piano player with a crescent moon for a head created what Jones called a "ripple effect" in the creature-effects industry.
Jones said he acquired a reputation as a lanky dude who "moved well in cumbersome costumes and didn't complain. That was a biggie."
He has played a half-kangaroo half-man (a mangaroo?), a zombie and, most notably, of late, the Silver Surfer in the 2007 Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
But it was his Abe Sapien in the original Hellboy (2004) that helped him transcend the realm of comic-book geekdom.
Jones' sensitive portrait of the scaly psychic who works at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence provided a counterpoint to Hellboy's (Ron Perlman) cigar-chomping brutishness.
"I was flying way under the celebrity radar for about 18 years," Jones said in a telephone interview.
"And all of a sudden Hellboy comes along and kind of put me as a speck there. Who's that bluefish guy?"
His fish tale would not be complete without Hellboy writer-director Guillermo del Toro.
When Jones played one of the supersized cockroaches in del Toro's 1996 Mimic, he sat across from the Mexican director at lunch one day.
Del Toro peppered him with questions about make-up artists and effects specialists Jones had worked with.
"All of a sudden I didn't have a director sitting across from me, I had a fan boy, Jones recalled.
Del Toro asked for Jones' business card and tucked it in his wallet.
Several years later, del Toro was in Hellboy preproduction, inspecting a full-scale model of an Abe Sapien design.
One crew member remarked that it looked like Doug Jones.
Jones swears that del Toro blurted out, "I know Doug Jones!" and pulled his business card out of the same wallet.
Then del Toro hired Jones again to play the Faun in the Spanish-language Pan's Labyrinth and the actor did all the US press for the Oscar-nominated film, further raising his profile.
"He [del Toro] has been able to make monsters and freaks of nature into leading men with all the human issues that the audience can relate to," Jones said.
"For that I will be eternally grateful."
For Hellboy II, Universal allowed Jones to also lend his own voice, previously done by David Hyde Pierce, who refused to take credit in deference to Jones' performance.
Jones calls the Frasier and Broadway star the best person he knows in the show business "ego system".
Last time, Abe Sapien and pals from the Paranormal Institute had to despatch reanimated Nazi hell-mongers.
This time, they try to defend mankind from an underworld prince who has harnessed the power of mythical beasts to shatter an eons-old truce.
You can actually gaze on Jones' own countenance in a few upcoming projects.
In the apocalyptic Legion, with Dennis Quaid, he plays an ice-cream man - not a walking Popsicle but a human who serves ice cream.
He also capitalises on a rare chance to be a leading man in NBC's horror anthology Fear Itself.
He is a rancher who mysteriously returns from an absence 27kg lighter and "possessed by something".
But usually it is not long before Jones is summoned for a severe makeover to inhabit some beast or goblin.
Over the years, he has tried to make the most of his time in the make-up chair: He gets to know the artist.
He watches funny YouTube bits on his laptop.
Most important, it is usually the one chance he gets to rehearse.
His status as the go-to guy for the heavily masqueraded has its roots in mime, he concedes without irony.
He practised the art at Ball State University and belonged to a troupe called Mime Over Matter.
"It was a whole art form that awakened in me that communication is only half verbal," he explained.
"The rest is your body language, your facial expression. That tells the rest of the story . . .
"I like to envelop a character - all of him. Every molecule of him needs to be working and in motion."
Perhaps he should start practising a stiff walk.
Although Jones' three-picture contract with Fox to reprise the Silver Surfer has stalled, he received one of the professional shocks of his life when del Toro declared at the Hellboy II premiere that he would like to develop a new Frankenstein with Jones playing the monster.
For a guy who has spent more than half of his Screen Actors Guild card-carrying life in the make-up chair, what is a few bolts in the neck? Says Jones: "An honour beyond all honours". - Ron Dicker
