Jamie Foxx and Grey Goose Vodka may have inadvertently brought Avengers star Jeremy Renner towards the role of Detective Twitch Williams in the Foxx-led Spawn reboot.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Foxx, who hosts celebrity sit-downs in the Grey Goose-produced Off Script interview series, spoke with the Tag star in a seven-minute episode published June 13. That meeting proved serendipitous: on July 9, writer-director Todd McFarlane announced Renner had won the role after the Hawkeye actor was “at the top” of McFarlane’s list.
“I had gone up to Mr. Renner’s house to go talk to him about the character to see, you know, basically try to do the sell. I think that was a Thursday. So by the time I did some other things… I flew back to Phoenix, I wake up Friday morning. And Jamie does these interviews with Grey Goose, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of them,” McFarlane told Screen Rant.
“And the one that he posted on Friday, which was literally half a day from where I was, was him talking to Jeremy. And I’m going, ‘Wow! This is serendipitous.’ I’m going ‘There’s Jamie, talking to Jere— this could actually be my two stars here.’ So I poked Jamie and went, ‘Hey Jamie just FYI, I just came from Mr. Renner’s house it looks like you guys are friends.’”
“I didn’t know they were going to be talking,” McFarlane clarified. The first time director said Foxx, the first role to be cast, helped prod Renner into the right direction.
“He didn’t know I was talking, I didn’t know he was talking. Again, I don’t know when they recorded it either you know, they could’ve recorded it two months [earlier], I don’t know,” McFarlane said. “But I go, ‘Oh, they at least know each other in some capacity.’ So I text Jamie and go, ‘Hey Jamie, we’re all trying to nudge the Renner team here, if you could chime in a little bit…’ So he helped too. They looked good together.”
For a first look at Foxx’s Al Simmons and Renner’s Twitch Williams, “just go to Jamie’s Grey Goose interview with Jeremy,” McFarlane joked. “And they didn’t know it at that point. But when I saw it on that Friday I went, ‘Wow, both these guys don’t know this could be it right here.’”
McFarlane previously compared the Twitch role to Jaws leading man Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), tasked with hunting a little-seen killer shark — in this case, Foxx’s Al Simmons, a Marine turned CIA agent who is murdered and resurrected as a super-powered Hellspawn.
Blumhouse has yet to stake a release date for Spawn.
