Exclusive! Sweet Revenge: "The Punisher" Interviews
By Scott Huver, Special to Hollywood.com
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Thursday, April 15, 2004
Tom Jane in "The Punisher" |
Look out...the Punisher is mad as hell, and he's not gonna take it--at all.
Not so long ago, when an actor landed a job playing a comic book superhero, he might assume he's going to have to start cutting the carbs in anticipation of wearing spandex and flashy colored briefs. But today's breed of superhero is altogether different. Take the Punisher, the latest good guy from Marvel Comics (Spider-Man, X-Men, Daredevil, The Hulk) to make the jump to the big screen, for example: All he needs to fight crime is a T-shirt emblazoned with a skull, some heavy artillery and ammo. Lots and lots of ammo.
At the premiere of The Punisher I asked Thomas Jane--who plays Frank Castle, a former vice cop who becomes the high-caliber hero after his entire family is wiped out by vengeful crime lord Howard Saint (John Travolta)--if he felt a little gypped that he didn't get to don traditional superhero tights and that odd exterior underwear. Jane just grins and turns to his new wife Patricia Arquette to ask, "Wasn't that what you were wearing?"
"That's what I wished you were wearing," counters Patricia (who, in fact, was displaying highly visible undies beneath a sheer Robert Cavalli gown at the moment).
"Yeah, that's what they told me I'd get," Jane says with a laugh. "But all they could find was this dirty T-shirt. And then they were like, 'We were going to give you some superpowers, but we couldn't think up any other ones to give you. But you're really angry.'"
Number One With a Bullet
Angry doesn't do the Punisher's mood justice. On film, as in the comics, the superpower-less Frank Castle is like an Extreme Super-Anti-Hero, driven by anguish and a thirst for revenge. And he's not beyond taking his quest for righteous vengeance to the ultimate end. Armed only with an arsenal full of ordinance, he's much more Dirty Harry than Batman.
"I love the fact that he doesn't have superpowers, that he's a real guy," says Jane. "That he's not about extraterrestrial stuff or paranormal this-and-that. He's a real guy and has to rely on his God-given talents and his wits and his skills to get the job done."
Jane insists, straight-faced, that he never read any Punisher comics before taking the role (the character debuted in the pages of Spider-Man back in the early '70s before becoming the breakout star of his own series of comics beginning in the '80s and remaining a hot property today) "No, I hadn't," he claims. "But I grew up reading comic books. And Patricia's read a lot of Punisher comics. She gave me the lowdown."
"That's right," Patricia corroborates--and indeed, as the comic geek's dream girl in True Romance and the ex of comic book collector Nicolas Cage, she's easy to believe. "I gave him the inside scoop."
"Every night," nods Jane.
"I punished him within an inch of his life," she adds. Then she confides: "He's pulling your leg. He's the comic book lover in the family. He was just throwing me a bone. I had nothing to do with it. He's a comic book nut. I'm the messy one. He's a little messy but I'm the major messy one, but his mess is pretty much all comic books."
I told Jane he didn't fool me. A year ago, just weeks before he was announced as the star of The Punisher, I was chatting him up about another movie and couldn't help noticing he'd been reading old issues of a comic titled "The Punisher War Journal." He admits he was more than ready to play Frank Castle (indeed, he even
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