Thor: Love and Thunder's villain, Gorr the God Butcher, may have been frightening in the film, but an early image depicts an absolutely terrifying version.
Ken Barthelmey, a character designer for a variety of films including The Tomorrow War, Godzilla vs. Kong and the upcoming Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, is no stranger to creating creatures designed to send chills down viewers' spines. Thus, a piece of concept art he made for Thor: Love and Thunder's villain depicts a truly monstrous version of Christian Bale's villain role that didn't make the final cut.
The concept image of Gorr is more aligned with the version found in the source comics. Rather than the humanoid features found in the Marvel Cinematic Universe's live-action depiction, the character is more commonly depicted with tentacles, sunken white eyes, an amphibian-like mouth and slits for a nose. Thor: Love and Thunder's villain, however, shed many of the alien-like features and left the God Butcher looking far more human than previous renditions.
In an earlier interview, director Taika Waititi explained the reason for the change in Gorr's appearance was to avoid the character resembling Voldemort from the Harry Potter franchise. "His face in the comics you know, unfortunately does kind of resemble Voldemort," he said. "People are just automatically gonna make that connection. So we decided to depart from that design a bit more and sorta keep elements of the tone, and the fact that he had the sword, but really it was about his story. That was the most important thing for us."
Not only were Gorr's features changed for the film, but his physique also needed to be altered significantly in order to allow Bale to play the character. The actor recently finished a film that required him to lose a significant amount of muscle mass, which made it impossible for him to reach the size that the villain is shown in the film. He also cited COVID as a major reason for the lack of time he had to prepare for the role.
As the actor explained of his body issues in another interview, "Well, that's not gonna be possible... and this g-string thing that's going on there." Bale said. "Well, that's just not gonna be possible in the state I'm in. And we literally have three days between me finishing one film and heading over to Australia for the quarantine and whatnot. I like to usually have much more time in between, but the pandemic meant that things got worked out that way."
While Love and Thunder's Gorr design underwent many changes, the final determination of the character's success was in Waititi's storytelling and the actor's performance. Despite many changes to his original design, Barthelmey stated that he loved Bale's portrayal of Gorr.
Thor: Love and Thunder is in theaters now.
Source: Instagram