As the highly anticipated Venom: Let There Be Carnage gets ready to barrel into theaters next week, Woody Harrelson has opened up about giving Carnage his live-action debut and going toe-to-toe with Tom Hardy’s Venom. According to Harrelson, while he was all aboard for portraying serial killer Cletus Kasady, a convicted serial killer who becomes infected with an alien symbiote, which turns him into the classic Marvel comics villain, he was less on board with actually voicing Carnage the same way that Hardy pulls double-duty as Venom and Eddie Brock.
In a new interview with Comic Book, Harrelson revealed how he was so reluctant to do the voice work that he tried to get director Andy Serkis to jump in, which was a reasonable ask given Serkis’ critically-acclaimed motion capture performances in The Lord of the Rings and the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy. However, Serkis wanted to stay behind the camera, so he eventually convinced Harrelson to embrace the voice work, which the actor now agrees was the right call. Via Comic Book:
“It’s wild, because in a way, you’re playing two characters in one. So there was a lot of discussion about the voice and also discussions with Tom, but obviously with Andy [Serkis], who directed it. And I just kept messing with the voice, and I was thinking to myself, ‘Who’s going to know the difference, if Andy Serkis did the voice, who’s a master of voices? Why don’t you do it, Andy?’ And no, he was insistent that I do it, but I really… I like how it turned. Obviously, effects are put on the voice, but I really like how it all turned out.”
While fans of the first 2018 Venom film have been patiently waiting for the sequel to arrive as the pandemic continued to push it further and further away, they received some surprising news earlier in the month when Sony announced that it’s actually moving up Venom: Let There Be Carnage‘s release date after seeing Shang-Chi‘s huge opening numbers. The Venom sequel was on the verge of being punted into January when Sony made the surprising call to release it earlier.
It’s an interesting gamble as the Delta variant continues to surge across the country, but as Shang-Chi showed, theatergoers are willing to show up when Marvel characters are on the big screen.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage opens in theaters on October 1.
(Via Comic Book)
