Jamie Foxx will play a powerful super villain with the lethal ability to bend electricity to his will. He says he will be the most fearsome opponent Spider-Man has ever faced
When the audience will get the first glimpse of Jamie Foxx, starring opposite Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in the forthcoming film The Amazing Spider-Man 2, they may not recognise the Oscar-winning actor. As Maxwell Dillon, a mild-mannered electrical engineer employed by the shadowy OsCorp Industries, Foxx shambles across the screen, hair thinning, eyes averted, a man defeated by life.
But his appearance later in the film, scheduled for release in April 2014, will be even more shocking, as Foxx becomes the most fearsome opponent Spider-Man has ever faced: Electro, a powerful and embittered super villain with the lethal ability to bend electricity to his will.
The film marks Foxx’s first outing as an unapologetic heavy. “I’ve played not-so-nice guys but this is my first time playing a real villain. And real villains get to do the coolest things. They colour outside the lines, which is fun. There are no boundaries,” he says.
Foxx, who won a best actor Oscar for his performance in 2004’s Ray and was nominated for best supporting actor that same year for Collateral, says his only hesitation about accepting the role was whether or not he would be allowed to explore the real man inside the monster. “With a role like this, the question is, are there going to be moments where I get a chance to actIJ But Marc Webb, our director, wanted exactly that. He always saw the big effects and the explosive action as add-ons and not the life of the story.”
Fortunately, Electro has a long and storied legacy in the Marvel Comics/Spider-Man universe, and the actor was able to take full advantage of the wealth of material available to him. “Max Dillon is a 42-year-old guy who just hasn’t gotten his life together,” explains Foxx. “He’s living with his mom, who dotes on him and refuses to allow him to grow up. As an electrical engineer for OsCorp, he’s really just the help.”
Max is a man who always seems to blend into the background, the actor says. “No one notices him. In fact, no one ever even calls him by name. No one remembers his birthday, not even his mom, which really hurts him. Having that backstory was fantastic for me as an actor. Sometimes in super hero movies, there’s no way to know how the villain became so venomous and angry. Here, we had an opportunity to look back at his history. Everyone he cares about has betrayed him. He walks through life unnoticed until he falls into a tub of eels being used by OsCorp in one of their mysterious experiments. That accident changes him forever and his story becomes the journey of learning, how to use his power and make it work for him,” shares Foxx.