Visual effects characters that thrill audiences tend to be boring for actors. Lots of dots on jump suits and motion capture and blah blah blah blah blah. Luckily, Thomas Haden Church had a good time becoming Sandman in Spider-Man 3.
Church on Being Sandman
"I found it very interesting," he said. "I'm not a tech head, but the whole phenomenon of what they do is cool and I got to be pretty close with [VFX supervisor] Scott Stokdyk. A lot of it, like they like to say, is inspired by me because the three big sequences, the birth of Sandman and then whenever he manifests himself out of the truck and then of course at the end of the movie. It was kind of this video-tracking, camera test process where many, many times they would have multiple camera sets and I would act it out because it's all so muted and bestial."
As director Sam Raimi likes to beat up his actors, Church also got to do a seriously dangerous stunt himself. "The insurance company would only allow me to do them one time and we literally rehearsed it for six hours before we shot it. It was when the de-ionizer or however you want to describe it. I always called it a kind of molecular accelerator. I decided to have my own scientific terminology. But that thing was built off of this Bell helicopter turbo engine and when it got up to full rev, the guys were like, 'Look, if you get hit it's like getting hit by a car at eighty miles an hour.' So that's why we rehearsed it as long as we did. I was on a tether, but the way that Sam wanted to do it is that you see the light bars going by and I had to run straight at those light bars and then get yanked back. Like I said, the insurance company, believe me there was a phalanx of representatives there that today, would only allow me to do it one time. I wanted to do it again, but it's the one that's in the movie. The intensity and quite frankly the fear is really there."
Spider-Man 3
Spider-Man 3
Like most physical roles, Church had to work out and buff up to be Sandman. "We started out pretty intensively for nine months before I started shooting, and just stuck with it because I had to maintain the appearance, but it was pretty intensive. I had guys in L.A., guys in Texas, when I went to do Broken Trail in Canada I had two guys there, and a school hall monitor that came up to check to make sure I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. The guy that trained me in L.A. were the guys that trained Brad Pitt for Troy, these guys Duffy and Mike, and Duffy would come and check in on me in Calgary to make sure I was behaving. But it was really about strength training and diet, I never did any cardio because as any fitness expert will tell you cardio is the enemy of muscle and they just wanted me to get bigger. I did, I gained 28 pounds of muscle and dropped 10 points of body fat, which for a dude in his 40s, let me tell you, was no bake sale. I could have done a Robin Williams movie, which is true. I was offered RV at the same time I was offered Spider-Man."
Spider-Man 3 opens to theatres on May 4th.
For the trailers, posters, stills and more movie info, go to the Spider-Man
3 Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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