Revealed the Star Wars character who inspired Red Skull in Avengers, Ross Marquand has. Seven years after Hugo Weaving wore the prosthetics that transformed the Matrix star into Captain America’s archfoe in 2011’s The First Avenger — which ended with a cosmic cube transporting the villain through space — Red Skull returned as the spectral Stonekeeper in 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War. Marquand, an impressionist and actor of The Walking Dead fame, then stepped in as the keeper of the Soul Stone on Vormir after Weaving turned down reprising the role.
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“We were just finishing up season 7 of The Walking Dead, and I got an email from my manager asking me if I did an impression of Hugo Weaving from The Matrix,” Marquand recounted during a recent panel appearance at Sci-Fi Valley Con. “I had never thought about doing Hugo, because it just wasn’t in my wheelhouse. And I said, ‘Which Hugo are we talking about?’”
A request to impersonate Weaving’s German dialect tipped off Marquand that the role was Red Skull. “They’re like, ‘We can’t really say what it is,’” he said. “I’m like, ‘That sounds like Red Skull.’ They sent me the clip, and sure enough, it was from Captain America: The First Avenger.”
Marquand submitted an audition tape and was ultimately called back to Atlanta to voice match Weaving on the secret project that turned out to be Infinity War, something he only learned upon stepping onto the set.
“I thought it was a voiceover job, and they’re like, ‘It’s a little bit more involved than that,’” Marquand recalled. “They put me in a motion capture suit — I didn’t know what in the hell was going on — and then I get into the studio, and there’s like 150 people waiting for me.” Marquand was greeted by directors Anthony and Joe Russo, who had him outfitted with a motion capture suit like the one worn by Josh Brolin’s Thanos and Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk.
“It wasn’t until they started putting the dots on that they said, ‘You don’t know what you’re working on, do you?’” Marquand said. “I was like, ‘They haven’t told me literally anything.’ [They replied], ‘Oh, this is the new Avengers movie.’”
In his first meeting with the Russo brothers, the directors explained what had become of the Red Skull in the 70 years since his disappearance. “‘You’re going to be playing like a future version of Red Skull who’s more broken, who’s kind of like a ghost almost at this point,’” he recalled the Russos saying. “And they said, ‘We want you to sound close to Hugo Weaving, but definitely give it your own flair.’” Marquand was instructed to play a Red Skull who had been banished to a remote planet where he guides others to a treasure he cannot possess.
“They said to try to infuse a little bit of Yoda into the voice,” Marquand added of Star Wars’ wizened Jedi Master. Initially taking the instruction too literally, Marquand impersonated the Frank Oz-voiced Yoda before adjusting his Red Skull voice to sound like Weaving with “the feeling of an alien creature that had been alive for hundreds of years and had infinite knowledge of the world.”
Marquand would go on to voice other Marvel villains throughout the multiverse, portraying the Infinity Stone-wielding Ultron in Marvel Animation’s What If…? and the ancient mutant Apocalypse in X-Men ’97.
As for potentially reprising Red Skull in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday or Avengers: Secret Wars, Marquand said, “I’m excited to see where they go, especially with Doctor Doom for Doomsday. That’s going to be really fun. We’ll see, I’m excited to see how it goes.”
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Image Courtesy of TOHO
