Last week it was rumored that Jeremy Renner was up for the lead role of Detective ‘Twitch’ Williams in Todd McFarlane‘s Spawn. Well, Deadline is now reporting that the rumor is true. Renner has officially been cast in the movie and joins Jamie Foxx, who was previously cast as Spawn.
McFarlane had this to say in a statement regarding the casting and why he ended up bringing Renner to the role:
“As a first time director, I wanted to surround myself with the most talent and the most skilled people I can on all fronts. I was lucky enough to land Jason Blum and then Jamie Foxx, and I knew the person on screen the most is this police officer, Twitch Williams. We needed as strong a person as possible because he will be the face of the film. I took my naïve Hollywood approach again, and said let’s start at the top and work down. Jeremy was at the top. I’m a huge fan of his. The character doesn’t need to be a bodybuilder or GQ handsome. I was looking for somebody who’s a person you’ve met before; I needed someone who can pull off the grief of an average human being. I’ve seen Jeremy do that in more than a few of his movies. He was at the top of my list, just like Jamie.”
It’s pretty awesome that McFarlane is landing the actors at the top of his list for this film. I’ve said before that it’s hard to imagine Renner as Twitch but he’s a great actor that will be able to pull off McFarlane’s feature film vision for the character. McFarlane went on to say:
“Spawn is King Arthur and Twitch is Sir Lancelot, and this isn’t about physicality, or jumping over buildings. This is more a brawn and brain combination, and the first film I think of with him is The Hurt Locker, the army grunt doing the job, and that spilled out into all these roles leading up to Wind River. There was a sense of melancholy to that character that is important and that was a movie also made by a first time director, but one who wrote the thing and so wasn’t nervous about trying to get what you want. Jeremy had the experience of working with the first timer and saw that if you put a good crew together, the whole is way better than the parts and you don’t have to worry.”
Producer Jason Blum added his two cents about the casting of Renner:
“Jeremy is the ideal choice for Twitch Williams. He radiates honesty, intelligence and a hard-working, everyman charisma, the same qualities that make Twitch such a compelling character.”
McFarlane says the next step will be to lock down a distributor for the film which will have a 10 to 12 million dollar budget:
“Jason and I feel we have a strong package here. Academy Award nominated and Academy Award nominated actor. As a first time director, I guess I’m the weak link, but I think my brand is strong. Hopefully when we go to studios, fairly soon, we’ll get the interest of more than one and we can pick what place will do this project justice, marketing and distributing it. We’re going to go for as close to a green light as we can get, since the development process has already been done. We’re looking for someone to say, ‘yeah cool, we’ll take it.’ It’s a reasonable budget, we’re not asking anyone to stretch. The goal here is a quality project at reasonable price.”
With the talent that Mcfarlane has brought in to develop this new Spawn film, I don’t think he’s going to have an issue landing a studio to distribute the film, especially with the extremely low budget that it has. I think this movie is going to be a big hit.
Are you happy to hear that Renner will be taking on the role of Twitch?
