‘Avengers: Infinity War’ Created Red Skull Entirely With CGI

Avengers: Infinity War featured the return of Red Skull — an archnemesis of Captain America that first debuted in Marvel Studios’ Captain America: The First Avenger. Although the studio approached Hugo Weaving to give him the shot to reprise his role, the actor ended up turning it down.

Enter: The Walking Dead star Ross Marquand. Marquand — a well-known impressionist — lent his voice to Marvel Studios to provide a picture-perfect replication of Weaving’s The First Avenger portrayal.

Outside of Marquand’s voice, the character was created using computer-generated graphics, according to a pair of individuals tasked with recreating the villain.

“There’s definitely kind of a wide spectrum of designs in terms of what he would look like,” Digital Domains’ Kelly Port told IGN. “Because it would be… do we get Hugo and put him back in makeup, and try to do it that way? But then he was teleported by the Tesseract, out of The First Avenger, to Vormir, so he was this kind of otherworldly thing.”

“It was some version of the artwork where the Tesseract did very bad things to his appearance, so he was much more skeletal,” he continued. “We did kind of end up in this place that was kind of a place in between, and showed both that the Tesseract did affect him and choose him in some kind of way to be this character on Vormir to give you the rules of the Stone, and kind of went from there.”

Port then confirmed that Marquand only provided the voice and that stands-in were on set performing the motion-capture aspect of the role.

“Ross ended up coming in later to do the voice,” Port said. “And so on set we had the stand-ins that were kind of performing when Red Skull was actually walking. It was one of the good things, too. Does he walk, is he slow? We kind of hit on this kind of ethereal feel to him, he’s kind of there, he’s kind of not.”

If Red Skull doesn’t make a third appearance in the MCU, Marquand wouldn’t mind moving on the play Marvel Studios’ version of Marc Spector/Moon Knight.

“But on the off chance that that character — I don’t know if he’s out of the MCU, or if he’s free to roam, or whatever — but if he doesn’t come back, I would love to play Moon Knight,” Marquand said. “Because that’s kind of Marvel’s — he gets compared to Batman a lot, like Marvel’s Batman, but he’s such an amazing character.”

Upcoming Marvel Studios films include Captain Marvel on March 18, 2019, Avengers: Endgame on April 26, 2019, and Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5, 2019.