Venom: Tom Hardy Didn’t Use a Motion-Capture Suit
In just a few short months, Sony will kick-start its highly-anticipated Spider-Man universe of comic book movies with Venom. In the film, Tom Hardy will play Eddie Brock, a journalist who comes into contact with an alien parasite that attaches itself to him. Through the process of symbiosis, this symbiote is able to encapsulate its host, transforming them into a giant monster with superhuman abilities.
By nature, bringing an accurate portrayal of Venom on the big screen could never be done by practical effects. After all, the character’s unique traits, from his size and tentacles to his snake-like tongue and sharp teeth can only rightfully come to life through the use of CGI. For that reason, it was widely assumed that Hardy, an actor known to give his all into a role, would have employed the use of a motion-capture suit to make sure that his performance would be translated into his take on Venom.
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However, that doesn’t appear to be the case. In an interview with Total Film, Hardy himself revealed that the idea of a motion-capture performance was discarded quite early in the process of the film’s production. “It wasn’t motion-capture, because the eyeballs on the creature, on Venom, and the mouth, they don’t match with my eyeballs and mouth,” the actor said. “So the mo-cap treatment went out of the window pretty quickly… Facially, your eyes and teeth and tongue are not going to match with this. And you need a 7ft tall basketball player in a Lycra suit for the physical shots.”
In this day and age of comic book movies, the use of motion-capture suits has become par for the course. For example, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Mark Ruffalo has performed all of the Hulk scenes through a mo-cap performance, despite the Jade Giant’s colossal size. Similarly, both James Spader and Josh Brolin brought to life gigantic Marvel villains — Ultron and Thanos, respectively — thanks to motion-capture.
These characters were all bigger than the actors who played them, which makes the idea to forego a motion-capture performance for Venom a bit odd. It’s therefore unclear if Hardy performed his scenes as Venom, or if the character was simply created digitally from scratch.
Sony’s Venom is expected to be the first film in an interconnected universe of movies based on Spider-Man characters. The studio is also developing a Morbius, the Living Vampire movie starring Jared Leto, while movies based on Kraven The Hunter and Black Cat are in various stages of development.
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Swinging into theaters on Oct. 5, director Ruben Fleischer’s Venom stars Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock/Venom, Michelle Williams as Anne Weying and Riz Ahmed as Carlton Drake/Riot.
(via Screen Rant)
