Remember: The next time you thirst after Venom, you’re really thirsting for Woody Allen. In an entertaining interview with Esquire, actor Tom Hardy revealed that his dual roles of Eddie Brock and Venom in Ruben Fleischer’s Spider-Man spin-off are based on an interesting trio of real-life people:
“Woody Allen’s tortured neurosis and all the humor that can come from that. Conor McGregor — the überviolence but not all the talking. And Redman out of control, living rent-free in his head.” Those are not details he revealed to the execs at Sony, which is producing the movie. “You don’t say shit like that to the studio,” he says. (Via)
So, just to recap: Hot Topic tongue monster Venom is inspired by the director of Annie Hall, a UFC fighter, and the star of How High? Got it. (Woody Allen, Conor McGregor, and Redman is also someone’s weird dream dinner party.) Later in the interview, Hardy refers to himself in the third person while discussing Sony’s upcoming “interconnected Spider-Man-related movies.”
“If the odds are stacked against Sony, that’s not my fucking business,” Hardy says. “It’s irrelevant.” He burnishes an image of himself as a creative lone wolf, and in the third person no less: “Tom is very mercenary when it comes to work. I cannot give a fuck what the writer, or the director, or Larry in Baltimore thinks about my choices.” (He later clarifies the perspective shift: “Sometimes I talk in the third person because it’s a lot easier to see myself at work as a piece of meat. So when Tommy says he doesn’t give a fuck what you think, it’s only because I give too much of a fuck, and it gets to a point where it stifles me.”) But it’s hard to square his claims of artistic purity with the occasional very non-lone-wolf detail like, “Market research shows that the biggest fan base for Venom is ten-year-old boys in South America.” (Via)
Venom — which also stars Michelle Williams — comes out on October 5, but if you’re a pre-teen living in, like, Ecuador, you already knew that.
(Via Esquire)
