Venom is making his presence known. The fan-favourite Spider-Man character has already made a surprise appearance in a new trailer during this month’s PlayStation Showcase. And now he’s returning to the big screen by way of Venom: Let There Be Carnage. This symbiote-filled follow up to the 2018 box office smash sees Tom Hardy reprise his role as Eddie Brock (and voice his alien other half). The two will face off against another comic book icon getting a terrifying, live-action adaptation: Carnage, another alien symbiote whose human side, serial killer Cletus Kasady, is portrayed by Woody Harrelson.

Directing this titanic clash is Andy Serkis, who’s not unfamiliar with breathing life into digital characters to critical acclaim: see his electrifying take as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, bringing pathos to Caesar in Planet of the Apes. His production company The Imaginarium specializes in motion and performance capture across movies, television and video games. Outside Hardy himself, Serkis is perhaps best suited to further ground and refine Venom’s live-action appearance. And that’s exactly what we talked about when I sat down with him (virtually) to discuss the movie sequel. 

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You’ve a template of the Venom character to work with from the original. How have you approached the character in terms of design and movement for the sequel? 

One thing when I came aboard that I was very keen to do is to establish an entirely different physical vocabulary for Venom and Carnage. Venom really is, like, an American football player crossed with a 400 pound gorilla, crossed with a killer whale. There’s a directness to that: how he attacks, how he moves. For people who are really watching out, they’ll notice that there’s a lot more integration with the environment. He has weight. You see the musculature movements, secondary muscle movements. All that stuff really plays in when he’s climbing buildings. You see the damage – the footprint if you like. You’ve got much more sense of his weight. 

And Carnage? 

We wanted to create the opposite, which was to make him move in such a way that wasn’t so bipeda

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