Venom is about to open in theaters and star Tom Hardy thinks his alien anti-hero is ready to take on “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes,” Marvel’s Avengers.
During an interview with MTV, Hardy got onto the topic first by discussing the film’s rating, noting that his kids play with Spider-Man and Venom toys side by side.
“My littlest ones, they watch Spider-Man and Venom quite comfortably…so it’s not like they’re scared by him,” Hardy says. “At the same time, there’s a lot within the real estate that you can actually imbue with a complete sense of gratuitous violence, and if you wanted to I think you’ve got the right people for that job if you want to push, because that’s where I’d love to go, and I’d love to go through all of the Avengers as well with him, but that’s above my pay grade.”
Hardy has no problem admitting he’d like to play in the same universe as the Avengers – “I want to run with the established family, why not?” – but has no problem with Venom standing alone if that’s what it has to do. “We have a Venomverse and 900 characters to play with.”
In further discussing how Venom would interact with the Avengers, Hardy’s co-star Riz Ahmed suggests that Venom would be working with an entirely different moral scale than the Marvel heroes.
“I think he would just try to eat all of them,” Ahmed says. That’s the thing with Venom it’s not really so much like good and evil. It’s like ‘Am I hungry, or am I not? And if I’m hungry, I’ll try and eat you.’ You might try to eat the Hulk. I think Venom and Hulk is a good matchup.”
Hardy adds, “He’s more about himself. He’s a very self-centered character and contained in that aspect. He who has the biggest hands eats the most. He’s quite mercenary in that aspect.”
Still, Ahmed notes that Eddie Brock and Venom do grow as beings when they come together.
“But when you put Eddie Brock and Venom together, it’s interesting because it’s almost like both the characters are learning the same lesson, because Eddie Brock starts off he’s just out for himself,” Ahmed explains. “He’s trying to save the world with his journalism and his investigative reports, but he’s also kind of out for himself. He’s willing to do ruthless things to get his story, his scoop, and Venom is basically out for himself, just trying to eat as much as possible, do what the aliens came here to do, and over the course of the film its about them both trying to learn this journey of life actually, we need to make space for other people in their lives, and the thing that teaches them that is they’ve got to make space for each other in the same body. Because they’re forced to live with each other, they realize how they also have to live with other people.”
