Actor and comedian Jamie Foxx has officially been cast to star in Todd McFarlane and Blumhouse’s upcoming Spawn film.
Deadline reports that Jamie Foxx will play Al Simmons also known as Spawn.
McFarlane confirmed the casting on Facebook saying, “YES folks.. you heard right!! We’ve casted SPAWN in the upcoming Spawn Movie produced by Blumhouse.I’m excited to tell YOU good people that the TALENTED, Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx has accepted the role of SPAWN!”
Al Simmons was a high level black ops operative for the C.I.A. who successfully saved the President from an attempted assassination. After saving the President, he was promoted within the C.I.A. and begin carrying out morally ambiguous jobs for the government. He began questioning if the government and his actions were right. Unfortunately, for Simmons word got out he was questioning the government’s actions. His partner Chapel was hired to to kill Al and carried out the murder in a blaze of fire.
After Simmons’ death his soul was condemned to Hell for knowingly killing innocents in his C.I.A. days. However, Al would make a deal with the demonic being known as Malebolgia to see his wife Wanda Fitzgerald. The deal was struck, but Simmons returned to Earth five years in the future as a demonic Hellspawn with no memory of what he had done. Spawn would go on to become an anti-hero as he took out a number of street thugs and gangs as well as a child murderer.
The upcoming film is not expected to tell Spawn’s origin story and the character is expected to have very few lines. McFarlane has previously said Spawn would actually act like Jaws.
“There’s two big roles in the script. There’s obviously sort of Spawn himself, although in a weird way it’s not the biggest role, and then there’s the cop. The cop is this character Twitch who’s been there since issue #1. Twitch is the role in this one, and I sort of refer to him as my sheriff Brody, who is the sheriff in the Jaws movie. Although it was called Jaws, Jaws didn’t really talk a lot in his movie, right? He just kind of showed up at the opportune time to make the movie worthwhile.”
McFarlane elaborated on this concept with Deadline as well as teasing a possible trilogy:
“The scariest movies, from Jaws to John Carpenter’s The Thing, or The Grudge and The Ring, the boogeyman doesn’t talk. It confuses people because of the comic book industry, and because they all default into their Captain America mindset and I keep saying, no, get into John Carpenter’s mindset or Hitchcock. This is not a man in a rubber suit, it’s not a hero that’s going to come and save the damsel. It’s none of that. At the end of the movie, I’m hoping that the audience will say either, is this a ghost that turns into a man, or is it a man that turns into a ghost? I’ve got a trilogy in mind here, and I’m not inclined in this first movie to do an origin story. I’m mentally exhausted from origin stories. Luckily, there’s a movie that just came out that helps my cause. In A Quiet Place, the first thing on screen is a card in black and white letters that says Day 89. It doesn’t care about what happened in those first 88 days. There are a couple headlines, but then we are on day 450. That movie doesn’t worry about explaining and giving all the answers. What it said in that case was, if you can hang on for a story of survival of this family, this movie will make complete sense for you.”
McFarlane also described his approach to Spawn’s character:
“If you want to see something creepy and powerful where you go, just what the hell was that? I’m not going to explain how Spawn does what he does; he is just going to do it. We’ll eventually do some of the background if we make a trilogy, but that’s not this first movie. The first movie is just saying, do you believe? And if you believe than that’s good because I’m hoping to take you for a long ride with this franchise.”
What do you think of McFarlane’s approach to Spawn? Are you excited to see what Jamie Foxx can do as Al Simmons?