Venom Director Confident Audiences Will Be Taken Aback By Tom Hardy’s Performance

Not for the first time, Venom director Ruben Fleischer has gone on record to wax lyrical about Tom Hardy’s dual performance.

If you’re not yet up to speed, Hardy is playing not one, but two characters in the October comic book movie. The first is a down-on-his-luck reporter hoping to catch a break (read: Eddie Brock), and the other, well, it couldn’t be more different. Spoilers: it’s the sinister symbiote, better known to you, I and Carlton Drake as Venom.

We say Carlton Drake because Riz Ahmed’s conglomerate has a vested interest in Eddie Brock’s raging alter-ego – so much so, that he’s willing to inject himself with the symbiote strand so that he can become Riot, one of Venom’s offsprings who is every bit as tyrannical as his name suggests.

Riot is just one of the five symbiotes rumored to appear in Ruben Fleischer’s Spider-Man spinoff, but while chatting to The Los Angeles Times (h/t Heroic Hollywood), the filmmaker once again heaped praise on Tom Hardy’s performance.

I think Tom is going to surprise a lot of people with his performance in this movie. It’s just a little different than we’re used to seeing him. There’s no mask in front of his face. He’s not playing a period. He’s just playing a contemporary guy. I think it’s just a little more of Tom than people have seen in a little bit.

It’s a performance for the ages, it seems, and Fleischer is confident that Tom Hardy will be able to knock everyone’s socks off come October. Which is just as well, given he’s already committed to a full-blown Venom trilogy at Sony Pictures.

Ruben Fleischer’s Venom film will be the first domino to fall on October 5th, and only then will we know the tone and direction of Sony’s fledgling Marvel universe. One thing’s for sure: it’s shaping up to be decidedly different from the MCU.