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One thing was clear to Tom Hardy and Kelly Marcel back before Venom’s black gooey goodness ever slithered off the comic book page: Venom 3, or Venom: The Last Dance as it became known, needed to be the end of the story.
“We always knew this was the conclusion,” writer-director Marcel explains while stepping into the Den of Geek studio alongside Venom 3 co-star Rhys Ifans. “We knew that we were signed up for three movies, or that Tom was signed up for three movies, and that there would be a three-movie arc, and that this is where we would leave Venom and Eddie. So we kind of knew all along that we were building to this.”
In that way, the woman who helped guide Venom’s transition from supervillain to international superstar was ready to take things home in a third outing, a film that also marks her directorial debut. Not that it hasn’t been a long time coming. Indeed, she and Hardy’s collaboration goes back well before Venom, beginning when they were just friends and Hardy suggested Marcel to provide a rewrite on his indie breakout Bronson (2008). She would also collaborate again as an uncredited scribe alongside George Miller and Nick Lathouris on Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) while developing her own separate projects, including the screenplay for Saving Mr. Banks (2013).
Still, Venom became something of her and Hardy’s creative baby after Marcel was brought on as one of several screenwriters on Venom, and then the only writer besides Hardy himself who worked on 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage. So stepping behind the camera for the final film seemed only natural.
“It felt like the right time to step up,” Marcel says now on the other side of the trilogy. “I had been on set for both Venom 1 and Venom 2, [and] there’s a lot of mine and Tom’s heart and soul in this one. It’s very emotional. It is about a friendship and we have a long friendship. So I really wanted to see this one through from inception to the end.”
That friendship between Eddie Brock and the symbiote who calls itself Venom has been perhaps the greatest innovation Hardy and Marcel have added to the character. In many comic book stories, the symbiote is a parasitic, or at least manipulative, presence in Eddie’s life; it’s a literal alien that thrives off Eddie’s addiction to their symbiosis. However, in the hands of Marcel and Hardy, the symbiote, or just “Venom,” has become an active and quirky personality, as well as one half of an odd couple. They’re all the odder, too, when you realize Hardy plays both roles. Together, they’ve become a bonafide superhero icon on the big screen.
“Yeah, but a really unreliable one,” Marcel says with an amused smile. “[Venom] lies all the time and withholds the truth from Eddie, who is also, you know, not the greatest person on Earth. Although I think they kind of make each other better in a way.”
That betterment will reach its true test in Venom: The Last Dance, which sees the pair having renewed their vows, so to speak, at the end of Venom: Let There Be Carnage and now being forced on the run by the government, which seeks to separate Eddie from Venom forever. Meanwhile, more symbiotes from Venom’s homeworld, under the direction of new big bad Knull, have also come to Earth in the hope of destroying Venom for good. Marcel likens the dynamic a little bit to one of the great romantic movies of all time.
“They’ve left everyone that they love and everyone that they know behind in this movie,” Marcel says, “and I think they’ve kind of reached true symbiosis, whatever that means for those two. It’s sort of Casablanca in a way, isn’t it? They finally decided to be together, and they can’t because the world will end.”
The allusion draws on a movie beloved for its finale where another pair of star-crossed heroes are forced for the good of the world to say goodbye. Is it fair to say that Venom: The Last Dance is also about lost love?
“Yeah,” Marcel considers, “and I’m not necessarily talking about it in a romantic way. I’m saying these two people love each other and have also witnessed what love is particularly by looking at [a human family]. There’s a moment in the movie where Venom says, ‘Sometimes I wish we could just have a life like this.’ Just the simplicity of that and the knowing that they can never have it, I think is really emotional. So, yes, it is a love lost at the end.”
The family in question is one headed by Rhys Ifans’ Martin, a free-spirit who might think the 1960s never ended. Introduced as a fella who is taking his young children deep into the American desert to show them Area 51—where he hopes to finally meet an alien—Martin is a relaxed and friendly presence in Eddie and Venom’s life when he finds them on the side of the road and in the red waste.
“He represents a beautiful side of humanity that Venom hasn’t really come into close contact with,” says Ifans. “An innocence, a curiosity, an endless curiosity, with hope and love… It’s interesting to throw a person like that into the mix to see what that does, and how it illuminates aspects of Eddie and Venom’s friendship and love for each other, and brotherhood that they may not have taken the time to observe.”
Ifans also thinks it is telling that the pair cross paths in the desert.
“I think there’s something quite mythic about it in terms of, dare I say, biblical [imagery] and of it being a journey,” Ifans considers. “Certainly the desert features very heavily in most of the great religions as a place of solitude and reflection, and that’s what it supplies here in this story too.”
It also is hardly Hardy and Marcel’s first rodeo in the desert. She even chuckles that of course it’s a wink and nudge to Mad Max: Fury Road when Eddie whines to Venom they’re “stuck in a wasteland!” The experience of going to a different desert with Hardy and maverick filmmaker George Miller is one of several on-set experiences that had a profound impact on Marcel.
“A lot of directors have had an influence on me, one being John Lee Hancock who directed Saving Mr. Banks,” Marcel says. “He dragged me to set every day and was like, ‘You’re going to make a shot list.’ And I was like, ‘Why I’m never directing,’ and he was like, ‘Well, you might one day.’” Still, the trip on the Fury Road proved especially informative to Venom and Eddie’s own road trip.
“George Miller, obviously a massive influence,” she continues. “Not only because he’s a genius—and I mean, he’s an absolute genius to watch—but he’s also the kindest man and he’s incredibly gentle and he runs a very kind, happy set. And I really thought that the way he works with everybody was so beautiful, and he showed me that you can build a family and you can make it fun. So when I asked these guys to come and make this movie with us, and promised them that it would be a fun time, I knew that, that was doable.”
The fun begins when Venom: The Last Dance opens in theaters on Oct. 25.
The post Venom 3 Director Teases Finale Is About ‘Love Lost’ Between Eddie and Symbiote appeared first on Den of Geek.
