Mike Mignola's Hellboy is in a league of his own as creator-owned comics go. Not only does the character's 25-year history hold a unique place in the hearts of fans, but as a franchise the big red guy has been adapted multiple times, with Neil Marshall's Hellboy reboot only the latest evolution.
At least that's how the character's creator, and the cast of the new movie, see it. CBR had the opportunity to catch up with Mignola, as well as stars David Harbour, Sasha Lane and Daniel Dae Kim, who stressed they had to deliver a different flavor from the previous Hellboy films of Guillermo del Toro.
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"They came to me and said 'This is the movie we're going to make.' They already had a treatment based on a book I did that I never would have chosen to film," Mignola said of the film drawing from his miniseries Hellboy: The Wild Hunt, with artist Duncan Fegredo. "So I was thrown at first. But then I realized that we didn't really want to start where Del Toro started. So we start kind of in the middle of the Hellboy storyline and then brought in elements from different stories.
"It's very much its own thing. The reason why I was surprised they would chose it was because it's the middle chapter of this very complicated story," he continued. "I thought, 'Start with one of the easy ones!' But once I realized how it was going to work and why it was going to work – because not only does it make for a terrific movie but it sets up a great pattern of stories. If you're going to start something that you hope will be several movies, then there's a whole thing here that has its own character apart from the Del Toro movies. You want these things to exist as their own thing."
Mignola added that, while the new film starts at The Wild Hunt, he worked with Marshall to deliver a deeper dive into the mythology. "When they brought me in, I was very happy because I could say 'I see what you're doing, but this would work better over here, or if you want that kind of a beat, let's borrow it from this.' It was my chance to stitch together my stuff. Someone handed me the skeleton."
Harbour agreed that his task was not just to make a performance happen. but to draw on everything emotional and even visual from the comics to make Hellboy true to Mignola's roots. "It was an interesting thing for me because I'd never done a comic book character before," he said. "And what's interesting is that you have a framework – like you actually have ballet positions like first position to start from. Hellboy has certain gestures from the comic that are fully realized. He has a jaw that does certain things when he feels certain things or experiences them. It was very interesting for me to play that and not to resist that.
"There are scenes direct in the movie that are from The Wild Hunt. Like, we're on a hill with horses, and you can see it," Harbour said. "I had a big blank-page notebook – a couple of them it wound up being – where I'd have the [script] scene on one side and then the panels from the comic on the other side. And I have all these notes and things. But it was interesting to have that framework. And I know our [director of photography] looked at Mike's work. Like sometimes Hellboy will be the only red thing on a page, and then in the page there are lots of blues and an accent of yellow, and I know the DP was trying to work with those primary colors to be faithful to the spirit of the comic as well."
"Everybody was on board with the fact that we loved Mike's comics and we wanted to make Mike's comics [on screen]," Harbour added, noting that it didn't stop there. "The one thing that I do feel like is that as a movie, you don't just want people who have read the comic to come to the movie and see the comic. We need to have some surprises, which we do have a ton of little surprises throughout. We do have some psychology that differs or certain roles between people that are a bit different than the comic. But it's all in the spirit of what Mike was trying to do."
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"As far as I know, 90 percent of the previz stuff on this movie was just looking at the comic. So that's a whole different thing," Mignola said, comparing this production to the previous films where he had to generate a lot of new design work for the filmmakers.
But beyond the visuals of Mignola's character, the cast and crew of Hellboy wanted to draw on the personalities of the characters – particularly the relationship between the hero and Lane's Alice Monaghan.
The actress explained that Harbour's physical transformation helped make that relationship true. "I felt closer to you as Hellboy," Lane said to her co-star. "Even though I knew our relationship was different here than in the comic, there is still that love and that soulmate. So I was looking for every detail to love about Hellboy to form that bond. So it became 'Me and David are cool, but Hellboy is my person.'"
"There's all this misfit stuff working around him," Harbour said of his take on the character. "I worked really hard. You're working to embody the spirit of this comic that you love, and they've also done it twice with Guillermo and Ron Perlman who did a great job and gave a terrific performance. So that plays in your mind as well. But I need to do what I do and make it my own thing. I'm more used to this because I grew up in theater and can look in my mind and see five guys doing Hamlet. They can all bring something different because the character is so rich, and I think the same thing about Hellboy.
"I think Ron and Guillermo explored many aspects of him, but there are other aspects they didn't focus on. My interpretation is a little more of that internal turmoil with his relationship to and his place in the world being a little more unstable. And it's maybe a little darker. He's still got this fun thing to him, but underneath it is this scared little boy who really doesn't understand human love and doesn't understand why he's beloved because of his destiny to bring the end of the world."
Mignola laughed at the way in which the film was able to extrapolate a new screen dynamic than the previous movies. "I'm relieved I created two female characters so we could do the Liz Sherman story and still have something else to do after that," he said.
Harbour agreed. "The great thing about Hellboy and Alice is that it's a love story, but they're not in love. It's a demon...I think Alice teaches him about love because of their connection, but it's very different from a classic romance story."
Delivering something different is the wheelhouse of director Neil Marshall, who's work in horror and on Game of Thrones has already shown the visceral way he takes on legendary fable storytelling.
Kim explained how the director's demeanor provided an unexpected layer of humor the movie needed to work. "One of the nice things about him is that he's soft-spoken, he's a gentleman...but at the same time he's got this really dry sense of humor that starts to come out," the actor who plays Ben Daimio said. "I thought that was perfect for the tone of our film. Not only is it darker than maybe ones in the past, but it's got a funny overtone to it. For all of us, it gave us room to play."
Harbour laid out the filmmaker's style saying, "He considers himself an introvert. So it's weird to have a director who is normally running around the set yelling at people be very quiet and contained. He likes his little jokes and stuff. But he's clear. He's very compassionate. At one point I was really going through hell, and he said to me 'It's okay. You're playing Hellboy.' He's very quirky, but the big defining characteristic is that he does these loud horror movies, and he's great with monsters. That's why he's great for this. But he's also a very quiet British guy. It's a weird dichotomy."
In theaters nationwide, director Neil Marshall’s Hellboy stars David Harbour as Hellboy, Ian McShane as Trevor Bruttenholm, Milla Jovovich as Nimue, Sasha Lane as Alice Monaghan, Penelope Mitchell as Ganeida and Daniel Dae Kim as Ben Daimio.