[IMG:L]After delivering an Oscar-nominated performance as a wine-sampling cad that went down as smoothly as a California cabernet in the acclaimed film Sideways, Thomas Haden Church’s big screen follow-up role is decidedly – and literally – more abrasive, as the Sandman, the tortured ex con transformed into a living sandblaster in Spider-Man 3. And he revealed all about the becoming the blockbuster’s bad guy before he slipped through Hollywood.com’s fingers.
Hollywood.com With all of the CGI and the FX involved with bringing the Sandman to life, there also wasn’t a whole lot of dialogue, either. How did you go about building your character starting with so little?
Thomas Haden Church: It was the most challenging thing. The birth of Sandman was by far the most challenging dramatic thing that I did in the movie, because we did it so much and it’s set up by the terror of being ripped apart. It also happens to involve by far the most dangerous stunts in the movie, which I did myself. The insurance company would only allow me to do them one time and we literally rehearsed it for six hours before we shot it. It was when the de-ionizer, or however you want to describe it – I always called it a kind of molecular accelerator. I decided to have my own scientific terminology – that thing was built off of this Bell helicopter turbo engine and when it got up to full rev, the guys were like, “Look, if you get hit it’s like getting hit by a car at 80 miles an hour.” The insurance company – believe me there was a phalanx of representatives there that day – would only allow me to do it one time. I wanted to do it again, but it’s the one that’s in the movie. The intensity – and quite frankly the fear – is really there. You’re right, though: because it was so muted and because you don’t have any vocalization of the character, you kind of just have to rely on how your body conveys the tragedy and your face to some extent, but not really in the birth of the character, and then the same thing when I come out of the trick. There is this ferocity that I’m really glad we were able to capture in melding the CG with how I acted it out in the video tracking. I thought it came through very well. I wanted to have that mix of anger and innocence. I’m just trying to get away from them and then whenever I come up they start shooting me and then I kind of get upset…It became, to some extent, the bane of my daily life when I was shooting, because you would hear crackling over the walkie, “Sam [Raimi] wants to meet with Thomas at lunch to shoot some more video of the birth of Sandman.” We really did a lot of it. There were very specific emotional beats that we wanted that they were going to layer upon. Particularly in the birth of the Sandman, without the advantage of eyes and real human facial expression you still wanted to convey the tragedy.
HW: Did you see your characters, the Sandman and Flint Marko, as totally different entities, in the way that the first Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus were both split personalities?
THC: No. They’re absolutely, intrinsically woven together really just the core of who Flint Marko is. When we first started this process, they asked me to do this movie in January ’05 and we immediately started having story conferences. I live in Texas full time and so a lot of it was on the phone, but any time that I came to L.A. for prep stuff Sam and I would together and Alvin [Sargent] and Ivan [Raimi], Laura [Ziskin], we’d all get together and talk about the character and it was always about Flint Marko. It was about the man because it was very important to myself and to Sam that we know who the man was and what his propulsion through the movie was sustained by. Sandman, like Frankenstein, is just the darker monstrosity and malevolence that he can’t control, not unlike the black suit that Spider-Man can’t control and ultimately Venom, Eddie Brock, can’t control. So, while Venom and Sandman don’t have a direct connection they’re mutually exclusive. They kind of suffer from the same problem as does Spider-Man with the black suit.
[IMG:R]HW: With all the critical acclaim that you got for Sideways, did you worry at all about a character with a lot of dialogue consisting of “RWRRRRR” in this film as your follow up to a great, more traditional performance?
THC: Four names: Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire. They are genetically incapable of delivering anything that isn’t superlative in the business. It has to be good. I knew that it was going to be a compelling and dramatic story because Sam refuses to do anything less. You go all the way back – I’m not a huge fan of Evil Dead, but I think that the characters’ stories in Evil Dead II are very compelling. Then you move onto Army of Darkness and particularly Dark Man, and then really one of my favorite movies, A Simple Plan, which is a very intimate character study really – I mean it has it’s psychological thriller kind of aspect to it – and I knew that between Sam‘s filmmaking history and what a thoughtful performer that I think Tobey is that this was going to be good. Sam introduced Tobey the other night at the Tokyo premiere as perhaps the finest actor of his generation and I concur. If you look at Ride With the Devil, which I think is a great film and he’s terrific in it, and then you look at Deconstructing Harry and he’s hysterical in it – he just has such amazing range as a performer. I think that they picked the perfect guy for these movies. And then having worked with Tobey over the last two years, he really is profoundly determined to find a character that the audience understands and wants to take a journey with. From the onset to the end they’re going to be happy and thrilled and saddened, but ultimately rewarded. So it’s the two of them really that made me want to do it. That was the fire down below for me.
HW: How much did you work out because you looked pretty ripped in the film and you’ve still got some of that going on?
THC: By the end of shooting I clocked in right at two years. We started out pretty intensively for nine months before I started shooting and I just stuck with it because I had to maintain that appearance, but it was pretty intensive…I had [trainers] in L.A., guys in Texas. When I went to do Broken Trail in Canada I had two guys there and a school hall monitor that came up to check and make sure I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. The guys who trained me in L.A. were the guys who trained Brad Pitt for Troy, these guys Duffy and Mike. Duffy would come in and check on me in Calgary and make sure that I was behaving. It was really about strength training and diet. I never did any cardio because as any fitness expert will tell you, cardio is the enemy of muscle and they just wanted me to get bigger and I did. I gained 28 pounds of muscle and dropped 10 points of body fat which for a dude in his forties was no bake sale, let me tell you. You’re talking like, ‘Ah! [grunting] I could’ve done a Robin Williams movie.’ [Laughs] Which is true, by the way. I was offered RV at the same time I was offered Spider-Man.
HW: Like Doc. Ock in the second movie, you’re a villain with sympathy rather than a villain who’s hated by the audience. What’s the difference there you think, you having the sympathy and Topher Grace‘s villain not having that sympathy?
THC: I think that my character certainly starts off in a place emotionally which addresses the worst fear of any parent, the possibility that you’ll lose your greatest gift, which is your child…Early on that’s what we wanted the anchoring of the character to be. It was that kind of impending tragedy with the character. I think that there are no bad guys in these movies. They’re just people that this far into the series, I think, come into these movies with a value system intact that’s corrupted by ambition or lust. In the case of Sandman, he’s really corrupted by the ferocity of his own good intentions. You’ve got to pretty much figure that whenever I become a sand tornado and I’m spinning through the streets of Manhattan and flipping over cars some people probably got f*cked up. That’s probably a drag, and they don’t care if my daughter is dying because their car got turned upside down, their Hyundai Excel. They don’t even see the hidden benefit that insurance pays and they get another car –
HW: Not if they’re dead.
THC: True, in which case their family collects death benefits, huh? [Laughs] They go party in Cabo. “Damn! I am all about Sandman, ya’ll!”
