Venom is the film that years from now we’ll say helped shift the paradigm in comic book filmmaking. It’s a marked departure from the realm of heroes and begins our descent into the mind of the supervillain .
In 2018 Sony launched their own American superhero film featuring the Marvel Comics with actor Tom Hardy starring as Eddie Brock in the titular role.
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It’s as exciting as it is groundbreaking. So to help celebrate and honor this incredible comic book offering, check out these 10+ behind the scenes secrets from Tom Hardy’s Venom that fans didn’t know!
1. Former UFC superstar Conor McGregor was part of Tom Hardy’s inspiration.
Tom was attempting to help round out the persona of Eddie Brock . He figured that Eddie was someone who knew not just how to fight but how to scrap.
Who better to look toward than former UFC featherweight champion, Conor McGregor?
2. For director Ruben Fleischer, it was a dream come true.
Ruben had been reading comics from the time he was a small boy.
He admits that he always was partial to the Marvel canon and that directing a Venom movie is the culmination of a childhood dream .
3. Tom Hardy voiced both Venom and Eddie Brock!
Think about how challenging it must be to act opposite yourself ? To have no one there to take any sort of visual or physical cue from?
Many would find it challenging but Tom Hardy came up with a unique solution.
He put an ear piece in his ear with all of Venom’s lines pre-recorded!
Tom used a device called an earwig. It allowed him to trigger and respond to all of the dialogue between Venom and Eddie Brock in real-time !
Supposedly, it was a technique Tom picked up on the movie Legend .
4. There had been a *Venom* movie in the works since the ’90s.
Producer Avi Arad had been trying to get a Venom movie made for years. He forced director Sam Raimi to include Venom as the villain in spider-Man 3 to help introduce the character to the world.
Sadly, the film was a flop and the project was scrapped .
When *The Amazing Spider-Man* reboot came out, hopes for a Venom cameo were brought back to life!
Sadly, they all came crashing down once Marvel bought back the rights to the character.
It was a bittersweet moment: the return of Spidey to the MCU meant any future plans for Venom to appear against Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man were once again shelved.
5. Ruben Fleischer was inspired by the horror masters of old.
Ruben grew up worshipping the likes of John Carpenter and Steven Speilberg.
If Venom feels like a cross between an ’80s horror movie and a ’90s action flick — it isn’t coincidental.
6. Combining the CGI with real life footage was difficult a times.
One of the things you’ll see often in the film is Venom is full-symbiote, with only a portion of Tom Hardy’s face showing.
Animators quickly learned that they couldn’t put a human-sized head on a seven-foot alien monster without it looking incredibly strange.
7. Tom Hardy improvised one of the film’s funniest scenes.
Supposedly Tom Hardy was never scripted to get into the lobster tank. At first, all of those friendly crustaceans were the real deal!
Once Tom told Ruben what he planned to do, they replaced the lobsters with plastic ones.
8. The character Venom has been around for more than 30 years.
Ruben Fleischer is pretty sure he understands why the character has had such incredible staying power.
Very few anti-heroes are painted with such a perfect balance. There’s as much humor to Venom as there is malice.
9. According to Tom Hardy, we haven’t seen some of the best footage of the film.
Venom has more than 40 minutes of deleted scenes that never made it past the cutting room floor.
Who knows, maybe one day they’ll see the light of day?
10. Pedro Pascal was considered for the role of Carlton Drake.
This was long before the part had been offered to Riz Ahmed.
No disrespect intended toward Ahmed because he is incredible in the film, but Pedro Pascal is interesting and an enticing choice.
11. The film is incredibly true to the comic books.
As I mentioned earlier, Ruben was a fan of the source material from the beginning. In order to help prepare, he read every single Venom comic that he could get his hands on.
12. Tom’s son helped guide him in the role.
A large reason why Tom accepted the role of Eddie Brock in Venom was that his son is a huge fan.
Tom leaned on his progeny for guidance and apparently he wasn’t shy about telling Tom when or if he was doing anything wrong.
13. It wasn’t about reinventing the wheel.
Ruben knew that he had to walk a delicate tightrope between leaving his mark on the character and staying true to his roots:
“We wanted to bring to life a version of Venom that fans could point to and say, ‘That’s the one that I always was excited to see on screen.'”
