Henry Cavill Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

i was very keen on really fleshing out superman's early stages of his journey first we had man of steel and then we went quite a bit darker with batman v superman and if he were to uh succumb to the anti-life equation and become bad superman i really wanted to make sure that we saw the hero superman and we saw this the true symbol of hope that the beacon of light before we went down the path of darkness and then redemption and still something that i am very keen to flesh out man of steel the wonderful thing about man of steel and what snyder and nolan and and i wanted to do with with superman was create a superman who was accessible in the sense that what would we do if we lived in a world where we had to keep every single aspect of ourselves hidden and we couldn't really truly interact with people and how would that affect us especially when you have that scene with kevin costner who's saying look don't don't reveal yourself the world is not ready for you yet and it'll only only be a bad thing clark does follow that that advice at first but then realizes that's not the way to go and that he must do what he must do regardless of that advice and that was the beautiful bit is that even though he has restrained himself and lived this life of of of loneliness essentially he's still willing to step out of the shadows and become the hero despite the fact that it's going to have a negative impact on his life and that i think is the aspect of that symbol of hope it's he's representing everything that is good about mankind despite the fact that mankind may not be good to him don't do this never [Music] at the end of man of steel it was set up so wonderfully to to begin that journey because he had had his first outing against the last member surviving over his species and had to kill him and that is going to inform a lot of who he becomes the terrible destruction of metropolis where he's fighting a someone who has the same powers of him but actually has training he barely makes it out of that thing alive and so what lessons has he learned he definitely isn't going to kill anymore and he's definitely going to make sure that population centers are completely removed from the equation because now he's experienced it and now he's thinking about it and so we get those steps towards building that that incredible wise version of superman rather than the you know still wet behind the ears kind the witcher the life of an actor can be very isolated i'm i'm i tend to be a reasonably private person and so when it comes to playing geralt i was no stranger to the idea of being the the solo nomad uh like traveller and going from place to place that's something i've been doing for 21 years now and so that aspect of geralt was definitely easier to tap into that's not how it happened where's your newfound respect respect doesn't make history toss a coin to your [Music] i think with with season two of the witcher my focus mainly lay with with making sure that the geralt orivia from the books was really shining through in my performance in the show when i say run you run when i say hide i have to stay you hide run in season one there was a deliberate choice of mine to be less verbose because i didn't have the luxury of the show being dedicated purely to geralt and so you don't have that swathes of nuance and complex dialogue which you have in the books and so i thought okay how do i reflect geralt's intelligence and his wisdom and i figured if i actually do the man who listens more and watches more and sometimes for some light comedic moments makes a judgmental noise or two when someone's finished waffling or pontificating then it might represent the character a little better the advantage of going into season two is that i actually wanted to make sure that that book geralt shined through a bit more especially now that we have him in a personal environment he's with cyrilla who becomes his ward and ultimately a daughter-like figure to him and then we're with his his witcher kin and and his father like figaro and vesemir and so at that stage he doesn't have to have the walls up he doesn't have to be so closed off and i wanted to really reach into it and just make sure that he had a more expanded vocabulary and that he sounded more intelligent and that he came across as someone who had the wisdom of between 70 and 90 years for me that was the real focal point of of season two i didn't i don't think i found any moments where i was like aha i found a little deeper level to geralt it was more about making sure that that part of the books lived in the show mission impossible fallout that was i mean firstly an amazing movie to work on uh such a good fortune to work with the likes of chris mcquarrie and tom cruise and and everyone on that it was rob hardy everyone they're the dp that is and i was counting my lucky stars every day that's how this is about sure it is i know you don't want me on this detail but let's face it if you'd made the hard choice in berlin i wouldn't be here if you hadn't gone down your syndicate agent they sent you to find i wouldn't be here that's right i know all about you you're why we don't have a living witness who can identify john mark or the apostles if you have a problem with my methods you can always stay behind your mission should you choose to accept it isn't that the thing some of the days that i was not quite counting as many lucky stars as others was the helicopter sequence now i loved it i thought it was a lot of fun but because i'm in a helicopter with the doors open above the mountains of new zealand in winter it's particularly cold it took two three weeks maybe four weeks to shoot that and so that's four weeks of me hanging outside a helicopter with my head in the wind and i'm firing real blanks and so it's not it's not like cgi stuff added [Music] i'm having blank residue flying everywhere i can't hear anything because my headset's not working i'm just waiting for the pilot to scream something and give a signal i'm like i think he means rolling we're moving so maybe he means rolling i'm just going to stick my head out the window and and start acting and maybe we're catching something that was probably the most difficult bit but at the same time the most thrilling because you're in a scene with an actor and a producer as dedicated as tom cruise who's learned how to stunt fly a helicopter in the mountains which is a very different thing mountains are very difficult for helicopters and you can see the whites of his eyes in the helicopter behind you as you're being chased you're pretending to fire this huge machine gun at him it's everyone's so happy at the end of each day and it's genuinely exciting and then at the end of each day i'm sitting on the skid of this helicopter looking out across the ocean off new zealand above a glacier and people don't get to do that that was something which is uh you know once in a lifetime experience and as much as it was a touch on the chilly side it was an experience which i i would not change for anything enough games i'll take you out of here where's hunt he's gone to the meeting with a copy of you calm down call me apostles i have no way of contacting them for their safety and mine what i do have is an extraction team with satellite overwatch in a pre-arranged rendezvous i'll know as soon as we leave the building enola homes the funny thing about approaching characters with as long a history as say sherlock holmes is that i don't approach it deliberately with the intention to make it my own i look at how it's been played before and i had the very good fortune of working with harry bradbeer and the character has been done so well before and it's all the the classic uh direct adaptations of the source material have been done so wonderfully that it actually allowed me room to to not necessarily do things precisely as the books have done before i have never seen such a range of romances in my life it's after turning into newspapers what heavens are you looking for why might you be interested in the personals you're going quite mad i have a right to be mad at a place like this i was forced into calligraphy as a child ah hated it but there's really a case where someone's handwriting doesn't tell me something i need to know and what might i learn from deportment the way a person stands may disguise who they are because this is a story about anola and sherlock is a player within that story i wanted to make sure that it was supporting a nola story more than anything else and to play sherlock in the way i played it was that was the intention always it was always to make sure that anola was the focus and that it was a a character who would do nothing but highlight all of a nola's wonderfully positive traits and we could tie back little family ties here and there similarities because ultimately nola and sherlock become come quite a pair because they do have some some real similarities in there and nola my god look at you you're in such a mess where's your hat in your gloves well i have a hat just makes the head itch and i have no gloves she has no gloves clearly not my dropped the man from uncle guy richie and i had plenty of conversations before we started shooting man from uncle and the wonderful thing about guy is that he is very much a creator he's very much a collaborator and so we would literally sit in his house and talk through scenes and throw ideas around and and it was always an open playing field and he was very honest he'd say that's a terrible idea we're never doing that or he would say you know what that's way better than my idea and i'm kind of embarrassed uh so let's put that in or he'd come back we'd come back the next day and say you know what i said it was a terrible idea i've thought about it it's not a terrible idea it's actually a really good idea we would work and manipulate this character and we'd find the best way of doing things and so as much as robert vaughan did an amazing job it was we wanted to make this this our own and and guy has such a particular style and he's such a wonderful director to work with i felt like i was in very very safe hands there and so no matter what we did it was going to be he was going to create something cool and we were going to do it together i'll let you tag along but it's in and out no mess so nobody knows we've been here and we both forget about in the morning [Music] what is it super hard and boron sharpened with a co2 laser co2 laser immortals it wasn't as challenging as as one may think working on a green screen of course tarzan was very generous and he had lots of artwork to show us and would say like this is this is what you're looking at basically if we were looking off a cliff top into an expanse beyond [Applause] it definitely was a great introduction because later in my career i ended up working in pure green screen rooms and that's a bit uh discombobulating when it came to immortals it was a good warm-up for the rest of it the tudors while playing charles brandon i had the really good fortune of the creator of the show and the writer being michael hurst michael hurst is very very talented and would always dive and delve deep into the history of all these characters to find the most interesting titbits and and sometimes he would combine characters otherwise would there be too many mary's margarets and elizabeth's to to kind of make sense of a tv show it's really hard to find material on charles brand and i've looked and he said yeah charles brown is a tough one to find to find stuff on and so he took what little he had and what little you could find in history and really expanded upon it it was such a pleasure having him write that character because he was it was almost like he was bringing the character to life i gave michael a gift at the end of the show saying if charles brandon were alive he would today he would thank you grace what do you want only to pass on his majesty's love he appreciates the role you will play at my lord buckingham's trial and draw the care you have for his majesty's well-being he also sends you this so for me it was using what came off the page really it was one of those pleasurable experiences of not having to really work against what's on the page or build it up into something else michael had done so much of the work there the count of monte cristo i was 17 years old playing 16 which at the time was a big difference obviously but for anyone our age now not so much several of my friends are going to roam twigs during carnival i'd like to accompany them and no chaperones i'm very only 15. almost 16. make my birthday present father i was in boarding school in england i met with priscilla john who was a casting director she was so supportive and she really sort of helped help me get the role really when it came to meeting with the director kevin reynolds it was a huge event for me because i was shortlisted for this movie at 17 years old that's a massive deal especially if you want to become an actor and you haven't really seen the outside world that much you haven't been around london all the time because i'm a kid from jersey it's a tiny island in in between england and france and when i'm not in jersey i'm in the walls of my boarding school and so to have this the world kind of reach in and start investigating who i was was a very very exciting thing [Music] [Applause] and then i had to have the conversation with my parents about the last year of my schooling and i said well what do i do and they said look you've always wanted to become an actor you know go for it see what happens if all falls apart if it fails you can go back to school you can get your a levels but otherwise run with the ball and so i did and here i am now the only way one can play a character who is so intelligent that he can dissect every other character before they have a chance to speak is a fantastic writer it's all up to the right it's all up to the director an actor can do whatever they want but if it's not on the page and it's not in the scene already and it's not and then the director isn't be able to able to pick it up and the editor isn't able to put it together then there's no hope for that characters look that intelligent and so it's all down to the amazing ability of jack thorne harry bradbeer and the editors

Channel: GQ

Views: 2,097,540

Keywords: cavill, celebrity, clark kent, gq, gq henry cavill, gq iconic, gq iconic characters, gq magazine, henry cavill, henry cavill 2021, henry cavill gq, henry cavill iconic, henry cavill iconic characters, henry cavill immortals, henry cavill interview, henry cavill movie, henry cavill movies, henry cavill superman, henry cavill the witcher, iconic, iconic characters, man of steel, superman, superman henry cavill, the witcher

Id: nWeqOTN6Dp0

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Jax_3145]

I don't where this idea that Henry Cavill doesn't want to come back started. He's stated many times in interviews he's eager to return and is just waiting for the call from the WB higher-ups. Until then he's exploring the opportunities playing Superman has granted him and is doing really well for himself right now.

If there is a hang for his return it's likely because he wants to do a full Man of Steel 2 that fully explores Superman in further depth, and won't come back for anything less. WB only wants to do cameos with Superman for whatever reason so of course he's going to say "no" to that when he knows there's so much more you can do with the character.

[u/OOevan]

Zach was not interested in that aspect of Superman. Immediately dead. Immediately evil the next turn

[u/xDefimate]

Him or his agent said years ago the cape is still in the closet. I don’t think it’s up for debate if he wants to play him again just if the script is right and the money is right.

[u/Scorpionking426]

He wants to come back but only if WB gives him a big check.