The long wait for a new Venom movie is almost over. Venom: Let There Be Carnage is opening only in theaters later this year, and IGN has teamed up with director Andy Serkis to exclusively break down the first official trailer for the hotly anticipated sequel.
Check out the video in the player above or embedded below, and then read on to read the highlights from Serkis’ director’s commentary.
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Eddie and Venom’s Dysfunctional Relationship
Right away, the trailer makes it clear Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his “other” are having a difficult time cohabitating the same body. Eddie is trying to put his life back together and rebuild his career as a journalist. But the symbiote only cares about playing the role of Lethal Protector — beating up evildoers and satisfying its bottomless hunger.
“They are now what is, in effect, the Odd Couple stage of their relationship,” Serkis says. “They’ve been together for… a year and a half, say, since the last story. And they’re figuring out how to be with each other. And it’s like living with this maniac toddler. Eddie is really struggling. He can’t concentrate. He’s trying to get on with work. And he, of course, only thinks about himself anyway, on the whole.”
Serkis continues, “So having this other being in a small space in his little flat, it’s like looking into kind of a weird, screwed-up mirror version of himself. And Venom of course feels trapped, because he can’t leave Eddie’s body unless he has his permission. And when they go out, the deal is – you live in my body, you live by my rules. And we’re under threat. We’re in a dangerous position here. We’ve got to keep quiet. And nobody must know because of all the things that happened in the last story, if people find out and get a grip of what’s going on then we’ll both be hauled into Area 51 and examined.”
In other words, as much as the sequel is about the long-awaited showdown between Tom Hardy’s Venom and Woody Harrelson’s Carnage, it’s clear Eddie will continue to be his own worst enemy.
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Cletus Kasady’s Eddie Brock Obsession
The first Venom movie introduced Harrelson’s Cletus Kasady via a post-credits scene, with the incarcerated Cletus promising: “When I get outta here, and I will, there’s gonna be carnage.”
That scene implied some sort of existing relationship or connection between the two characters, and the trailer for the sequel shows Cletus has developed quite an interest in Eddie during the months in between movies. In fact, he seems to almost be the Hannibal Lecter to Eddie’s Clarice Starling.
Serkis makes it clear Cletus is drawn to Eddie because he senses a kindred spirit. Eddie, meanwhile, sees this relationship as an opportunity to dig into Kasady’s twisted past and uncover the burial sites of his missing murder victims are buried, thereby reigniting his own journalism career.
“They both had strange upbringings with strange relationships with their parents and their families. And there’s an inherent loneliness that they both recognize in each other,” Serkis says. “Cletus actually reaches out and will only speak to Eddie Brock. That’s at the beginning of the story, we learned that he’s the only one he’ll speak to. And the cops, therefore, want Eddie to go in and investigate and try and discover where some of the bodies, some of the many bodies of Cletus’s victims are.”
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“He’s on a mission,” Serkis adds. “But also, he’s self-serving in only the way that Eddie can be. He wants to get in there and maybe he can make a story, get back to what he wants to do most, which is writing and the written word and being a journalist. So this sets up really the confrontation, or the false relationship, that Eddie sort of pretends to have with Cletus, in order to get information out of it.”
As the trailer shows, Cletus’ madness is reflected through the strange, intricate drawings lining the walls of his cell. Those drawings may or may not have a special significance to the plot, but they definitely offer insight into the terrifying mind of Cletus Kasady.
“Cletus has an extraordinary child-like but vivid imagination and mind, and he expresses himself by drawing,” Serkis says. “His cell is completely covered with these really bizarre markings and expressions. It’s like his anger and frustration and his sadness and his desperation and his loneliness.”
Finally, for fans curious about the drastic change in Cletus’ hairstyle between movies, Serkis indicated the change is meant to reflect the passage of time and the evolution of Cletus’ mental state.
“We wanted to give a sense that he’s been in there for some time and that he’s gone through various changes. … so that we could really [see] what’s going on with the darkness of the character.”
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How Does Shriek Fit In?
While Carnage is clearly the central villain of this story, the sequel is also introducing Naomie Harris’ character Francis Barriston (aka Shriek). In the Marvel comics, Shriek is both a partner and lover to Carnage. While Serkis is keeping mum on whether or not the two will be romantically intertwined in the movie, he reveals she directly ties into the movie’s emphasis on troubled characters with abusive parents.
“She’s a damaged soul and she really has suffered in her childhood,but there is a real vulnerability about her, and she’s in a lot of pain… She’s been living in isolation for years, years and years,” Serkis says. “With all of these characters, what’s so beautifully drawn about them is that they’re multi-faceted, they’re totally truthful and believable, and yet … She’s dangerous too and I think she has her own sense of fairness and being just, and I think when that line is crossed, then you see a very, very dangerous, dark side to her, and that’s what we wanted to do with the character.”
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Serkis does confirm the sequel will explore the tension between Eddie and his ex-girlfriend Anne Weying (played again by Michelle Williams). At this point, Anne is still in a relationship with Reid Scott’s character, Dr. Dan Lewis, but Serkis teases the old spark may still be there.
“She’s kind of made a decision in her life, ‘I’ve got to move on. I can’t be with this person. He’s totally unreliable. He’s not truthful. He’s a ride, and I’ve enjoyed this wild kind of character that I’ve been with, but he’s not for me. At the end of the day, I’ve got to find someone who I can trust, who I can move on and be with and form a reasonable partnership with him, just not be thrown around all the time by this craziness.’”
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Bringing Carnage to Live-Action
It wouldn’t be much of a superhero movie if the main villain remained powerless and behind bars the entire time. The trailer makes it clear Cletus will cheat death during his attempted execution, somehow bonding with a piece of the symbiote and becoming Carnage.
“This character was so much fun to work on in design and to take [from] the comic world,” Serkis says. “It was wonderful having the opportunity to take this character that’s never been seen before on screen, as much as you do get to know him in our story and to really play with the physicality, how he moves, how he extrudes his tentacles.”
In the comics, the symbiotes grow progressively stronger with each new host, meaning Carnage is usually far too powerful for either Spider-Man or Venom to handle alone. But Serkis explains that his movie seeks to reflect the differences between Venom and Carnage. Cletus may not be the physical heavy-hitter Eddie is, but his deranged personality opens up a whole new world of abilities, including some fans have never seen before.
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“He can turn to mist. He can turn to all manner of tendrils. He can take different forms. He can weaponize, he can do all of these different things,” Serkis says. “With all symbiotes, they reflect the person who is their host. So the darkness of Carnage, the playfulness, the wit, the strangeness. Cletus has a real intelligence and… a real sense of humor, and we wanted to reflect that in the symbiote that is linked to him.”
Given Serkis’ history with motion-capture performances (playing Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies, Caesar in the Planet of the Apes reboot series, etc.), it should come as no surprise he brought that experience to bear on his first directorial assignment. Serkis tells IGN a great deal of attention was paid to the way these characters move on-screen and highlighting the physical differences between Venom and Carnage.
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“Venom is… pretty straightforward in a way. He’s like a quarterback. He’s very grounded, very physically sort of heavy, and like a quarterback where brute force is very much his thing. Whereas Carnage, in the same way that Cletus is manipulative psychologically and physically, he can take your energy and completely shift it for you. So we wanted the whole movement style to be very idiosyncratic and off-kilter and strange, and you just can’t pin him down. It would be like trying to have a fight with an octopus basically.”
Serkis adds, “Also, what we were able to do, which was amazing, was to go and work with dancers and actors on a performance capture stage, and then see things come to life and then use little bits and practice, just trying stuff out. It was a really exciting period of building the movie actually was Carnage movement tests. That was a really exciting part of it.”
Venom: Let There Be Carnage opens only in theaters on September 24 in the US, September 15 in the UK, and September 16 in Australia. For more on the sequel, find out whether Venom: Let There Be Carnage takes place in the MCU, learn about Carnage’s new powers, get our two cents on why Venom doesn’t need Spider-Man and check out the new Venom 2 poster.
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