Kraven the Hunter star Aaron Taylor-Johnson on the Marvel movie's violent action sequences: "We definitely pushed the boundaries!"
Exclusive: J.C. Chandor and Aaron Taylor-Johnson on earning Kraven's adults only rating
Kraven the Hunter is punching and stabbing his way towards the big screen, with director J.C. Chandor promising a no-holds-barred take on the Marvel Comics supervillain. Want proof of how violent this thing is gonna be? You can watch the first 11 minutes of the film for free, which sees Kraven – AKA Sergei Kravinoff, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson – break out of prison and bloodily despatch one of his enemies.
"The stunts needed to be spectacular," said Chandor in an exclusive interview alongside Taylor-Johnson with 12DOVE about the film's visceral action sequences. "There was a sort of a relentlessness to the character that we both picked up on. He just never seems to give in. I really wanted the stunts, right from the beginning of designing them, to have a reality to them. You can kind of get away with doing anything right now with the technology that we have, so it's about almost limiting what the character can do. And then you've got this guy [referring to Taylor-Johnson]. He's just a physically gifted performer. That's a lump of clay that you can do a lot of pretty cool stuff with!"
"I think also a hard R [rating] meant that we didn't need to hold back," added Taylor-Johnson. "We were trying to fit it in that box and then it was just like, we've got to unleash this character and do him justice. They allowed us to make it an R, and we definitely pushed the boundaries!"
Kraven the Hunter, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, and Alessandro Nivola, arrives in cinemas on December 13, 2024. For more upcoming comic book films, check out all the new superhero movies flying your way very soon.
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Will Salmon is the Comics Editor for GamesRadar/Newsarama. He has been writing about comics, film, TV, and music for more than 15 years, which is quite a long time if you stop and think about it. At Future he has previously launched scary movie magazine Horrorville, relaunched Comic Heroes, and has written for every issue of SFX magazine for over a decade. He sometimes feels very old, like Guy Pearce in Prometheus. His music writing has appeared in The Quietus, MOJO, Electronic Sound, Clash, and loads of other places and he runs the micro-label Modern Aviation, which puts out experimental music on cassette tape.