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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turned down a earlier leading role as another big-screen Marvel character to wait for this one–although no one is saying which character that was, lest the actor who took the gig discover he wasn’t the first choice).
And despite the dead-serious nature of Frank Castle, Jane reveals that he was positively giddy behind the Punisher’s stern scowl. “I was having a blast. I’ve been waiting to make this movie since I was 13 years old.
“I loved the concept so much. I loved the punk rock, stripped-down, bare-knuckle, take-no-prisoners action film that we made,” he continues. “We just took all the air out of it, all the bullshit, just made no apologies. We made it for a certain kind of person who loves that kind of thing, and everybody else can go f*** themselves. If you get it, you can f***in’ love it. That’s the idea.”
It’s Good To Be Bad
In films like these, the hero–even an anti-hero–is only as good as his antagonist. First time writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh (the scribe behind megahits such as Armageddon) and executive producer Avi Arad (who’s steered all the Marvel characters to the big screen) went for an ace in the hole when looking for bad guy, and landed it when John Travolta signed on to play evil, money-laundering crime lord Howard Saint.
“I wasn’t sure I was going to play this until the last minute,” reveals Travolta, saying he actually waited to see what Jane and the other actors were doing with the material before he decided to commit. In the finished film, the actor plays the character very close to the bone, unlike the over-the-top antics of most supervillainous opponents.
“This is a new character [not in the comics] and there wasn’t anything to base him on,” says the actor, who while not a comic book reader growing up (“I was lip-synching to records,” he grins), learned about the character from his 12-year-old son, Jett. “I had to come up with an original. And I thought ‘If I play it over the top, how do I do it?’ I had this idea of a spidery villain that was funny and almost grotesque in a way, but it was just whittled away.”
Travolta explains it was really Jane who set the movie’s tone–and that it’s actually funnier being dead serious than being a cartoon character. “I looked at his dailies and he was very real, doing it almost like a Scorsese movie. When I found out they were playing it dead serious, and that was pretty funny, I thought, ‘OK, then I’m going to play it subtle and serious and it will be funny.’ Most comic book movies think they have to do the other. I think the key here is the more serious he was, the funnier he became.”
Still, Travolta couldn’t resist indulging in a few campy moments, playing homage to entirely different stars of Hollywood’s Golden Era.
“Since Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, honestly, nobody gets to walk down staircases like I do in this movie,” he laughed.
“We had to make sure that the comedy was not over the top,” agrees John Pinette, who in person is a dead-ringer for his comic book character, the Punisher’s gangly neighbor Mr. Bumpo. “We stood in danger of making it look too comic bookish, too cartoonishl.”
“The only one that was a little more of an homage to the comic book was the Russian. We kept the scene just like in the comics, and it works,” adds producer Avi Arad. He’s talking about the comically brutal, knock-down, drag-out fight scene between the Punisher and The Russian, a striped-shirted assassin played by wrestler Kevin Nash that plays just as it did in the pages of the comic book.
Not that the fight was all fun and games, the wrestler reveals: “Actually we had an accident in which somebody didn’t move one of the stunt knives, didn’t put a retractable blade in it and Thomas actually stabbed me in the collarbone. He looked at me and said ‘I’m sorry, big man.'”
Sultry actress Laura Elena Harring (Mulholland Drive) also had fun with her
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vengeful, vampy character Livia, Howard Saint’s wife. Twisting him around her finger like a modern-day Lady Macbeth, she pushes her husband to acts of evil he might not otherwise have committed after one of their sons is killed early in the film. “Well, I did order the Punisher’s whole family to die,” she purrs. “How much more evil do you want?”
Travolta was intrigued by the notion that Saint and the Punisher were two different sides of the same coin when it came to their families. “My character’s obsessed with Livia differently than the Punisher is obsessed with his family,” says the actor. “His is a healthy obsession, where mine is a possession obsession. But they do push the same buttons in each family, but from different levels. One’s the high road and one’s the low road.”
Jane Addiction
Beyond promising to be yet another box office triumph in the comics-to-film genre, The Punisher also promises to be a star-making vehicle for Jane. “Tom‘s always been such a great, solid actor,” Patricia tells me, “and now this is just everyone getting in on the secret.”
Travolta certainly has glowing praise for Jane‘s stripped-down, hard-boiled performance. “He did in this film what Clint Eastwood and Bronson and McQueen really wanted to do. He just played it to the best of his acting ability, and it’s the culmination of all those films, that he ended up with that performance.”
Most difficult for Jane was the intense physical conditioning and strict diet required to give him the chiseld body Frank Castle required. “I went on a liquid diet–just so I wouldn’t eat,” Jane explains. “I went on a liquid diet during the whole time we were shooting, for three and a half months of the shoot. Just all protein and liquid. They filled me up like a NASCAR, I’d just run over and guzzle it down and get back to work.”
I had to ask: “Once you were off that diet, what was the first thing you just had to have?” I ask.
“Cheeseburgers!” he exclaims, just as a waitress passes with a trayful of mini-burgers. He grabs one and wolfs it down.
His quest for muscles didn’t go over well at home, according to Patricia. “I wasn’t really into that. I was like, ‘We can’t go out to dinner? We can’t live a life? We can’t eat? You’re just working out all the time.'”
Jane squeezed her and extends his stomach into a mock-pot belly. “How do you like me now, baby?”
“Yeah, I like you now,” she giggles.
The Punisher opens in theaters nationwide April 16.
