Speaking with ComicBook recently about his career in geek media, The Walking Dead and Avengers: Infinity War star Ross Marquand revealed that the way he brought the Red Skull to life in Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame was inspired by Star Wars. Specifically, it came from a note, with Joe Russo telling him to infuse the ancient and somewhat doomed feeling of Yoda into the character — something Marquand understood and responded to right away. Prior to that, Marquand said, he was trying to do his best to mimic what Hugo Weaving had done in the character’s first screen appearance — but the directors wanted him to lean into the ancient, troubled, cosmic being that the Skull had become.
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Marquand, who also plays Charles Xavier in X-Men ’97, told ComicBook that it took him a while to dial in the new voice, but that once he figured it out, it felt totally at home. Ironically, he also pointed out to us that Cedric Smith, who played Xavier in the original ’90s X-Men cartoon, also voiced Red Skull at some point.
“They were great, and they gave me the best direction, because once I figured out what it was, I was thinking, ‘I gotta do a straight voice match to what Hugo [Weaving] did in [Captain America:] The First Avenger,’ which is very pitched,” Marquand told ComicBook.com. “And the Russo brothers really stopped me, quickly, and they said, ‘No, no, no, no, this is a broken version of that character. He’s 80 years older but he’s cursed with infinite knowledge, and now he can fly and he’s got all these other powers, kind of like a phantom.’ So they said, I think it was Joe Russo, he said, ‘I want you to infuse a bit of Yoda into this character, not voice-wise, but a creature that had been around for over a thousand years,’ and I thought, ‘Ah, okay.’ And that’s what brought the high-clipped, nasally, German tone down into something of this creature that had been alive and seen everything and just cursed with all this pain and knowledge, but could do nothing with it. Like Atlas holding up the Earth, he wants the [Infinity] Stones so badly but he can’t attain them now.”
You can see our full-length interview with Marquand on YouTube here.
