While Abbott has his new horror-thriller coming out, the actor reflects on how Kraven just didn’t seem to work out due to studio meddling.
Christopher Abbott has some big hairy shoes to fill as he follows the likes of Lon Chaney Jr. and Benicio Del Toro in his new film Wolf Man. The new Blumhouse horror movie from the director of The Invisible Man remake takes a similar route in reimagining the story of the Universal monster classic. Abbott would already be featured in a film recently where man and beast have a kinship — Kraven The Hunter, Sony’s latest offering in their Spider-Man villain solo series. Kraven, although it didn’t look like the trainwreck Madam Web nor Morbius was, still became Sony’s lowest-grossing Marvel movie.
Abbott would sit down with The Hollywood Reporter to promote Wolf Man when they inquired about the roll of the dice on movies like Kraven. Abbott responded,
Yeah, you never know, man. Absolutely. That’s the thing. This business is inherently the most collaborative art, and, essentially, the most expensive. So there’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen, sometimes, and whether that’s the actors, the director or whoever else is around, it takes a village.”
Abbott played The Foreigner in Kraven and his co-star, The Brutalist‘s Alessandro Nivola was dumbfounded with what happened with the studio’s dealings with the filmmakers as his experience was actually quite pleasant. Nivola attested, “I really don’t know what happened behind the scenes. On these kinds of movies, you hear about all the wranglings at the studio, and maybe there were too many chefs. I don’t know. I don’t know enough about what the process was beyond just my experience of being on set, which was really joyful.”
While Nivola got to turn into a rhino in Kraven, in the film Wolf Man, Abbott makes the famous metamorphosis into a wolf. In this incarnation, while the make-up was there to help him immerse himself into the creature, he also talks about using his body language in the prolonged process that the movie takes in transitioning him from man to beast. Abbott explained, “Yeah, the progression is very gradual in this movie, so being able to play with how much he progresses was really interesting. It starts with just the fingers, and then it eventually just works its way up through the arms and the rest of the body. So there was a lot to keep track of, but it’s fun to play with physicality like that.”
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Originally published at https://www.joblo.com/christopher-abbott-kraven/
