Given the opportunity, few actors would turn down the chance to collaborate with Tom Hardy – and fewer still would turn down the chance to collaborate with Tom Hardy on Venom, the Sony-backed anti-hero spinoff that is fast becoming one of the most-anticipated movies of 2018. You know, even if Avengers: Infinity War tends to steal the headlines.
It’s coming together quite nicely under the watchful eye of Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland), after recent set photos appeared to show Hardy wrestling the famous alien symbiote. Set to spearhead Venom as the haunted Eddie Brock, Tom Hardy is undoubtedly the beating heart of Sony’s offshoot, and his involvement in the project was enough to convince Michelle Williams to sign along the dotted line.
When asked to identify what drew her to Venom, the four-time Oscar nominee pointed to Hardy:
It’s, um, well for me it’s Tom (Hardy). I just thought, well, that guy knows what he’s doing. I’m just going to go steal some of his moves, figure out what he knows. I just wanted to, you know, you’re only as good as the people you play with and I really wanted to challenge myself with him as a partner.
Making the transition from prestige, Oscar-worthy dramas (see: Manchester By the Sea) to CG-heavy blockbusters proved to be a steep learning curve for Williams, who will assume the role of Anne Weying come 2018.
“I’ve done one other movie where I was asked to track a tennis ball with my eyes and pretend it was a giant creature thing. Not my favorite thing in the world to do, but it is a skill set and I’m trying to learn it,” she said.
Pegged for a release in October of next year, Venom is shaping up to be a hardboiled Spider-Man spinoff, which is something fans have wanted for as long as we can remember. Whether it can deliver the goods is another question entirely, but we’ll find out in little over nine months’ time.
