Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City’s Avan Jogia took some time to reflect on Leon’s evolution across the film. Comicbook.com had the chance to catch up with the star and speak about how the movie adapted the events of the second game in the wildly popular horror game series. Leon Scott Kennedy is a mainstay of the franchise. A beloved character that has had a bunch of screen time in some of the most popular entries. Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 4’s impacts are still felt across the medium to this day. (Also, both games have either gotten or have incoming remakes that also struck a chord with audiences.) Well, it took Jogia a second to get into the groove of things. Funnily enough, that transformation matches up with Leon’s experiences in the Raccoon City Police department during that fateful night. Sometimes the right equipment makes all the difference in the world.
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“You know, it’s funny, ’cause we shot it in sort of a similar order, like we shot the beginning parts of the film at the beginning of the production. So I was like not in the Leon outfit, I was just dressed as like a cop and doing scenes, that I was like, is this, are we doing it? Like I was, you know, I wasn’t sure maybe the first, like as I am on almost every project I’ve ever been on, the first three days or four days, I was just like, I don’t know, you know, if I’m in it yet or I don’t, you know, I’m not there yet, as far as like my experience with it, the movie was going great, just my experience with it,” Jogia explained. “And then, you know, day four hit and I got the cut-off gloves and I got the armor on and now he’s got a gun, he’s got it out and pointing it at zombies, he’s got the flashlight, he’s got the Leon pose and I was like, oh yeah, okay. Now we’re cooking with gas, you know, I felt like that’s when it sort of clicked for me.”
Getting back to those roots mattered to director Johannes Roberts. He talked about making sure that horror genre tone came back to these movies when speaking to Entertainment Weekly.
“I’m a horror guy. I’m a Stephen King guy. I’m a John Carpenter guy. All those things are sort of built into the fabric of this movie,” Roberts said. “I was just like, ‘Let’s make a scary movie again.’”
“I remember playing that second game and going, ‘This is the movie. This is it,’” the filmmaker continued. “It just blew me away completely. The aesthetics of it, the tone, the mood. I was like, ‘This is the cornerstone of what we’re going to do.’… I think [Welcome to Raccoon City] sets everything up really well, an origin story for each of our characters. I think it would be really important to me that we don’t just use this as a springboard to then just go off into our own crazy world. I think there’s so much in the games that is so fascinating and exciting that I would really love to continue to explore that.”
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