Was there a lot of blue screen involved in your scenes?
Yeah, there was a lot of blue screen but not as much as you’d think. We had kind of blue screen days and green screen days. But a lot of the time it’s set in New York City so you’re at the diner, or you’re on the bridge, or you’re in my office, or you’re in Reed’s office or something like that. And so there wasn’t as much as you felt like there was.
There was a lot of green screen happening without you even kind of realizing it, if that even makes sense. Like the space ship. There were green screens the whole way around the outside of the space ship. But they weren’t really… You didn’t feel like you weren’t in a space ship. It wasn’t just you standing around on a green screen. Whereas usually a lot of green screen work is just you on the green screen. You’ve got to pretend everything. So you had all those kind of tools with you. You didn’t have to worry about creating everything with your mind. Although I must say the whole green screen thing is a great experience for an actor I think.
How tough were the fight scenes?
That kind of stuff… I think that becomes, like we were talking about a moment ago, the green screening kind of stuff. You have to create the situation as much as possible in your head. That’s one of the reasons that I kind of thank “Charmed” for so many things and that is I spent three years pretty much working on green screen. When you work on green screen, you have to dream up everything in your head because it was just literally me in a room like this with green stuff behind me and everybody else was ‘X’ marks on these stands. You have to create the whole world and make it believable.
At first it’s intimidating because you’re just standing there on your own going, “What the f**k am I doing here?” And then once you start to get into it and you start to enjoy it, you really kind of get this freedom as an actor. It’s the same thing with those fight scenes. You have to make it… It has to be as intense as it has to be when the audience is watching it and saying here are two big powerhouses about to go against each other, which is me and Ben. When you’ve got those two going at it, you don’t get bigger. So you have to bring that to the table.
Did you have very much knowledge of the comics before shooting this movie?
Oh yeah, very much so. I used to watch the cartoons when I was like six or seven. I used to wake up at 5:00 in the morning and I remember it was on at 5:30. I’d watch “Fantastic Four” and then I think next it was “Spider-Man,” and then the guys with the Wonder Twin powers. I was a huge [fan]. I got into the comic books after watching the cartoons. I was a huge fan when I was a kid.
Dr. Doom is considered the most complex villain. Do you see him as a villain or as misunderstood?
I see him as both. I see him as initially - and this is the way we start him off in the movie, and it was really taken from the original comics, like the 56 original comics – and that is that he is a man who is pretty much reasonably egotistical, very much set on getting what he wants out of life and will do whatever he has to do and can do to make sure he gets that. So with that kind of person, that kind of mindset, I think when the circumstances happen to him that happen to him in the movie and everything kind of turns against him, I think it’s almost a natural progression for him to go.
He has villainous qualities because he will trample you. I mean, even just as a businessman before he became this Dr. Doom thing, he’d run over you if he had to. He didn’t care. It was all about business. It was all about making money and getting power. That kind of has a villainous aspect to it to a certain extent, I think, anyway. And then on top of that, I call it the disintegration of a human being. And that’s kind of what happens to him in the movie, and also what happens to him in the comics.
It’s almost tragic.
Yeah, very much so. So it’s both I think. You see the movie and you let me know (laughing).
You referred to Von Doom as a Rupert Murdock type…
I know. I shouldn’t have (laughing) and I take it back. Well, there’s only a certain few men on this planet that are visually those type of men that we know have that kind of power and money. And I think Rupert’s one of them.
Julian McMahon on the Script and Battling The Thing
