Actor Toby Kebbell's star is very much in the ascent. From his attention-grabbing debut in Dead Man's Shoes to his snarling, villainous, motion-capture performance as vengeful ape Koba in this summer's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the young Brit has Hollywood calling.
And he's about to get dark again in upcoming comic book reboot The Fantastic Four. Directed by Josh Trank, the film is set to reboot the Marvel property that previously came to the screen in 2005 and 2007.
Kebbell plays baddie Doctor Doom (previously played by actor Julian McMahon), alongside Miles Tiler as Mr. Fantastic, Jamie Bell as The Thing, Kata Mara as The Invisible Woman and Michael B. Jordan as The Human Torch. But whereas the earlier films were on the light and flimsy side, Kebbell is promising something very different from the comic book incarnation...
"He’s Victor Domashev, not Victor Von Doom in our story," Kebbell tells Collider. "And I’m sure I’ll be sent to jail for telling you that. The Doom in ours—I’m a programmer. Very anti-social programmer. And on blogging sites I’m 'Doom'."
It certainly sounds a far-cry from McMahon's campy, masked turn in the previous movies. Kebbell's reference to social media also indicates that Trank has updated the comic for a contemporary audience. And it's not just the characters who've got an upgrade, as Kebbell explains.
"Josh, the whole deal, the lo-fi way he did it, the ultra-real," says the actor. "It was just nice to do that. It was nice to be feeling like we had to come to terms with what was given by this incident."
It sounds as if Trank is taking his cue not only from his previous film Chronicle, which added a gritty, found-footage twist to your common or garden superhero origin story, but perhaps also Christopher Nolan's Batman films, which famously reinvented The Caped Crusader to reflect the murkier moral climate of the modern age.
Is this what fans want? The Fantastic Four aren't exactly the edgiest superheroes in the Marvel universe and indeed the earlier films were criticised for this, in spite of their enormous success (the first took $330m; the second, Rise of the Silver Surfer, $289m). Clearly the studio has confidence in the future of the franchise: earlier this year, sequel The Fantastic Four 2 was announced as having a release date in 2017.
We'll find out if Trank and Kebbell's approach pays off when The Fantastic Four is released on 29th January 2015.
