Now that Todd McFarlane is teaming with Blumhouse to try and get his new vision for Spawn behind cameras, the legendary comic book artist has been talking to a variety of press at the San Diego Comic-Con about the long-gestured project.
The biggest reveal is that Al Simmons (Spawn) isn’t the main character. McFarlane talks to Vulture about the script, explaining that the hardest sell is that the Spawn never speaks. “The lead isn’t really Spawn,” explained McFarlane adding that “the Spawn character doesn’t talk.” When execs in Hollywood would question this, he would use Jaws as an example of how it works, teasing Spawn coming out of the darkest and just eating people up. Watch him talk about this below:
Jamie Foxx had allegedly been circling the role of Al Simmons (Spawn) for years but I’m not sure how the actor would feel about a non-speaking role. Still, McFarlane says Academy Award winning talent have been approaching him.
“Yeah, a couple approached me,” McFarlane told Comicbook. “Those are still on the table, and I just recently signed with CAA, the largest and biggest talent agency in Hollywood, so they’ve got lots of talent that they will sort of start pushing and funneling towards it if they think that the roles are there.”
Circling back to his Jaws reference and that Spawn won’t be the main character, it will actually be a police officer:
“There are two big roles in the script,” he added. “There’s obviously sort of Spawn himself, although in a weird way it’s not the biggest role, and then there’s the cop. The cop is this character Twitch who’s been there since issue #1. Twitch is the role in this one, and I sort of refer to him as my Sheriff Brody, who is the sheriff in the Jaws movie. Although it was called Jaws, Jaws didn’t really talk a lot in his movie, right? He just kind of showed up at the opportune time to make the movie worthwhile.”
It might not seem it, but Jaws and Spawn have a great deal in common, at least from a point of view standpoint.
“It was Sheriff Brody, the humans talking, chasing the fantastical thing that sort of made the movie, and to me, there’s that element,” said McFarlane. “Everything else is normal in this story other than (gesture) the shadow moves, and at times even when it moves, the cop just sort of thinks he’s losing his mind so he doesn’t even trust that the shadow’s moving. If you’re a bad guy, then this thing is going to come and it’s going to get you.”
Okay, so who would play this Sheriff Brody character? McFarlane told Vulture he was inspired by Leonardo Dicaprio’s performance in Wolf of Wall Street. “When I was writing I had Leonardo in my head,” pointing to the character’s lunacy as a draw. “There is a manic-ness in him.”
In Spawn, created by McFarlane for his Image imprint back in 1992, an elite mercenary is killed and comes back from Hell as a reluctant soldier of the Devil.