This English celebrity is a talented film and stage actor and is known for his ability to fully embody his characters while performing. Hardy has perfected many different voices and accents, but did he voice Venom?
Tom Hardy did voice Venom in the Marvel superhero film. Hardy played both Venom and Eddie Brock, an American investigative journalist who becomes the host of Venom. Venom’s voice is Hardy’s voice with some voice modulation effects used.
Read on below to find out more about how Tom Hardy voiced Venom, as well as some of the other effects that they used in the film.
Voice of Venom
The character Venom in the movie has a particular alien-sounding, somewhat threatening voice. Hardy’s voice acted as the base of the voice, and the special effects team of the movie then modulated it to sound less human.
It’s not Hardy’s normal voice that he uses to record Venom, though. In an interview with EW, Hardy talked about the development of both Eddie and Venom and how he found their separate voices.
“They have different sounds. I always saw Venom as sounding like a James Brown lounge lizard, and Eddie Brock is kind of…” Hardy trails off before switching to an easygoing American accent. “I don’t know, an everyday kind of guy. But he’s inherited this massive ego, this beast.”
He also talked about what it was like to record Venom’s voice and film with it. “[T]he sound boys, they worked relentlessly to trigger [it] — I’d have to lay down the vocal for Venom in the morning and then play Eddie opposite in my earpiece, and whoever was working in the scene with me, had to hear Venom at the same time but then ignore that they’d heard Venom,” Hardy explained.
“And whenever I gave my cue line as Eddie Brock — this might not make any sense to anybody who’s not really techie and geeky about things like this like me — but Patrick Anderson would be under the stage queuing Venom accurately so I could cut across him and talk and argue with myself, and stuff like that.”
“It’s a bit techie, it was fun. It was really, really good fun, and the sound boys, actually, to be fair, probably really play Venom. It’s my voice, but they play Venom,” Hardy finished.
He was attracted to the film for many reasons, one of them being the hybrid, dual personality dynamic between Eddie and Venom. The other was that Venom was not a traditional hero at all, and had very complex feelings on the matter.
“There’s a tragic clown element, which I find funny and is harmonious with some of the work that I like to do. There’s something funny about the circumstances of having a gift but it’s a tragic gift. It’s a superpower you don’t really want, but at the same time, you love it. It makes you feel special. He’s a reluctant hero and an anti-hero,” Hardy said.
Check out the YouTube video below to hear a sound comparison of all the actors who voiced Venom over the years.
Other Effects
Whatever the effects used, many fans have tweeted their opinions on the movie and on Hardy’s performance, like in this post which calls it “enormously entertaining.”
In an interview that IGN posted on Twitter, the crew talks about Hardy’s performance and the other ways in which they brought Venom to life.
When asked what Hardy brought to the role, Oliver Scholl, the production designer, said, “It’s imagination. It’s like, trying to imagine this creature in yourself and he’s very experimental about it, trying out different versions of what he could be saying… you can’t write that in a script, really.”
“This film is much more demanding, because obviously we’ve got to integrate this digital character very closely with Tom’s performance,” the VFX supervisor, Paul Franklin, said.