Venom: Let There Be Carnage director Andy Serkis revealed what he did to give the film's iconic symbiote antagonist his own unique set of moves.
In interview with IGN, Serkis explained how conceptualizing Carnage's moments for Woody Harrelson involved a combination of imitating both Marvel panels and real-life performers. "In terms of Carnage himself, we trawled through every single comic which involved Carnage and looked at all the different ways he moved physically, the way that he was able to shapeshift, to manifest himself in different ways and that's was where we used performance capture to bring Carnage to life actually in the testing phase," he said.
Serkis added, "We brought on board parkour artists and dancers and then really experimented with the fluid way... We wanted a different way for him to move than Venom, and so we used their movements as a way of generating a kind of very... kind of twisted, malevolent, very different energy to the way that Venom moves and fights."
While the comics inspired this CGI Carnage, Serkis also described his version as an amalgamation of different iterations of Carnages from different Marvel comic eras. "We didn't settle on one particular, one version of Carnage because there were just so many and so many moments that we wanted to bring to the screen which manifested in different ways so that he could be this incredible adversary for Venom," he continued.
The official Venom: Let There Be Carnage trailer teased not only Carnage's movements but also his grotesque design and abilities. These include sprouting spiked tendrils from his back and using them to quickly move about rooms and stick to the walls of a church, as well as form solid hand-blades and morph his body to let bullets phase through. Other Venom TV commercials not only teased more Harrelson as Cletus Kasady and Carnage, but also Naomie Harris as Marvel villain Shriek, Kasady's occasional girlfriend.
Serkis has a renowned history with performance capture thanks to his roles as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, as well as Caesar in the Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy. He recently reprised his role as Marvel antagonist Ulysses Klaue in the latest Killmonger-centric What If...? episode, a character who debuted in Avengers: Age of Ultron but whose status as a vibranium trader was expanded upon in Black Panther.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage, starring Tom Hardy and Woody Harrelson, releases in theaters Oct. 1.
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