“I’ve never played a character like Ronan before,” Lee Pace recently told Yahoo Movies about his turn in “Guardians Of The Galaxy.” I like a bombastic villain, and that’s what I had a good time doing. It was the most fun playing this character…He’s just so evil. At first when I started working on him, I was thinking, ‘We’ve seen so many great performances of villains by very talented actors in superhero movies. I’ve got to find something relatable about this guy.’ But the more I played him, the more fun I had with just being evil. [Laughs] Evil, evil, evil. He’s an alien – there’s no kind of human rules. There’s nothing to relate to, actually. It just became, like, the more dark I could conceive of him, the more I understood him.”
And that will be an interesting bit of shading to James Gunn‘s upcoming Marvel which seems to blend his ability for quirky comedy with an epic space adventure. The studio has dropped a handful of new stills to give you a closer look at the batch of oddball characters populating this world. From Rocket Raccoon to Groot to Drax, you get new looks at them all, while Peter Quill represents the sole human, and we also get a couple of shots of The Milano too. Will it be too weird for mainstream audiences or is that exactly the selling point?
Perhaps that’s a question to pose to Joss Whedon, the current guru of the Marvel-verse, who has an interesting take on Christopher Nolan‘s realistic (and influential) take on superhero movies. “Now, I watched ‘The Dark Knight‘ and I thought of that as riffing on the genre,” he told Huffington Post. “That was a superhero movie as ‘The Godfather.’ And I was like, ‘But I just still want to see a superhero movie!’ We had just gotten the technology to make it awesome, and I wasn’t ready to be post-modern about it yet.”
However, that glee comes with limits. After laying waste to an entire city in “The Avengers,” don’t expect the same in the sequel. “People have made it very clear that they are fed up with movies where entire cities are destroyed, and then we celebrate. I try to make my superhero movies as if there’s either never been one or there’s only ever been them,” he said. “I work with the idea that it’s just a natural way for people to be, so that you still make a movie about people.”
So, will ticket buyers be down with a raccoon and tree for their heroes? Find out on August 1st.