STACK #208 Feb 2022

MOVIE FEATURE

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debut,” says producer Avi Arad of Venom’s comic book nemesis. “He’s Venom’s ultimate adversary, stronger and more violent in every way. It doesn’t help that serial killer Cletus Kasady is Carnage’s host, enhancing his maniacal worldview into something incredibly sinister. In the comics, Carnage is Venom’s offspring – his ‘son,’ if you will – which makes the conflict between

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them far greater.” A seasoned performer of CGI characters and the use of performance capture, Serkis reveals that he took on the job directing Let There Be Carnage following a call from Hardy. “When Tom gave me a call out of the blue, saying he thought it would be great if I directed the sequel and asking me to come on board, I think it was because he wanted a director who would be capable of safeguarding his performance, translating it into a visual effects realm, with some degree of authority from experience with that. “I’ve spent a considerable amount of my life playing a character with two sides to his personality,” he continues. “I knew that this film would be about how to free up Tom to imagine Venom’s presence. We knew it would not be helpful for him to act opposite a man in a suit, because Venom is a symbiote, coming out of him.” Consequently, Serkis chose to animate Venom and Carnage with a more traditional CG animation approach. “We wanted to give Tom the freedom in his process to give the performance he wanted.” “Andy has spent years in front of the camera as well as behind it,” notes Hardy. “He’s done performance capture and animation, and he understands story and nuance and vocal landscapes. He’s a great actor, a great director, and a decent man too. He was perfect to direct this and has done an amazing job.”

There’s a nasty new symbiote in town in the FX-laden sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage , and he’s more than a match for the double act of Eddie Brock/Venom. A s brash reporter Eddie Brock, who becomes an unwilling host to an alien symbiote, Tom Hardy got to

flex his comedic muscle in 2018’s Venom . Reprising his role in the sequel, Venom Let There Be Carnage , the British actor confirmed what viewers had already suspected – he had a blast in the Jekyll and Hyde-like role. “It’s a joy to play two different parts of a psyche because Venom and Eddie are one for me,” he says. “They are just differentiated by the fact that one is the monster and one is Eddie, but they are always contained within one individual.” Mutual mistrust resulted in a fractious marriage of co-dependency in Venom , which is further complicated in Let There Be Carnage ; Venom and Eddie may have come to an agreement but are still driving each other crazy, and must decide whether or not they need each other at all. “The film is a love story

Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock and Woody Harrelson as Cletus Kasady

But they have to be with each other – they can’t live without each other. That’s companionship – love – the things that relationships are really about.”

Further complicating their relationship is the arrival of Carnage, a beloved villain in the Venomverse, who is created when Eddie visits Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson), a serial killer on death row. After Kasady bites Eddie’s hand and ingests a fragment of the Venom symbiote, he is transformed into a ruthless and malevolent alien menace, liberated from the restraints imposed by Eddie. “Carnage is who the fans have been waiting for, finally making his big screen

VENOM IN THE MCU? End credits’ teasers in both Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Spider- Man: No Way Home suggest it’s only a matter of time before Venom and his webslinger nemesis finally meet onscreen, with Marvel boss Kevin Feige confirming that Venom is now a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. "You look at the obvious comic connotations between Venom and Spider-Man and it is inherent,” he told Collider . “So the minute Sony made their Venom movie and it worked as well as it did, and Tom Hardy became as iconic as he has become as Venom, then the obvious question is then, 'How do we start to merge them?'" Watch this space…

– but not the love story you might think,” says director Andy Serkis. “It’s very much about the extraordinary relationship between symbiote and host. Any love affair has its pitfalls, its high points and low points; Venom and Eddie’s relationship absolutely causes problems and stress, and they have a near-hatred for each other.

• Venom: Let There Be

Carnage is out on Feb 16

14 FEBRUARY 2022

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