‘Spawn’ Reboot Casts ‘Avengers’ Stars Jeremy Renner as Twitch Williams

Todd McFarlane’s Spawn reboot film has added another high-profile casting addition, in the form of Avengers and Mission: Impossible star, Jeremy Renner. Deadline has dropped confirmation of Renner’s rumored joining of Spawn alongside Jamie Foxx, while also revealing details on who the Hawkeye actor will play. According to the site, Renner will indeed be playing the other leading role of Detective Twitch Williams!

McFarlane explained the casting choice with this statement:

“As a first time director, I wanted to surround myself with the most talent and the most skilled people I can on all fronts. I was lucky enough to land Jason Blum and then Jamie Foxx, and I knew the person on screen the most is this police officer, Twitch Williams. We needed as strong a person as possible because he will be the face of the film. I took my naïve Hollywood approach again, and said let’s start at the top and work down. Jeremy was at the top. I’m a huge fan of his. The character doesn’t need to be a bodybuilder or GQ handsome. I was looking for somebody who’s a person you’ve met before; I needed someone who can pull off the grief of an average human being. I’ve seen Jeremy do that in more than a few of his movies. He was at the top of my list, just like Jamie.”

Blumhouse head Jason Blum added:

“Jeremy is the ideal choice for Twitch Williams. He radiates honesty, intelligence and a hard-working, everyman charisma, the same qualities that make Twitch such a compelling character.”

The Spawn reboot is now gaining serious momentum, after landing at Blumhouse Productions. McFarlane is set to direct a modestly-budgeted R-rated film ($10 – 12 million) that will be more of a supernatural thriller genre blend, rather than a straight up superhero and/or horror film. As McFarlane told Comicbook.com, Foxx’s Spawn will be a lot like Jaws:

“When you start going into creep movies, then the camera doesn’t follow the boogie man, or the monster. It follows humans, which I have in my movie. But people enjoy creepy movies and don’t go, ‘Oh my gosh, I wish I saw the boogie man more.’ They don’t do that. They just go, ‘Wow, that was cool.’”

As for the version of Twitch we’ll see in the film? McFarlane describes it like this:

“Spawn is King Arthur and Twitch is Sir Lancelot, and this isn’t about physicality, or jumping over buildings. This is more a brawn and brain combination…”

In the comics, Twitch is mild-mannered to his partner Sam, but over the course of the series he proves to be a highly intelligent and skilled detective, as well as a humble and loving family man. The mild-mannered persona belies the fact that Twitch can seriously hold his own when the guns start blazing; but when he begins to encounter the supernatural in the form of Spawn and his Hell-War, Twitch has uneasy decisions to make about whether to help or bring down the Hellspawn creature.

The Spawn reboot doesn’t yet have a release date.