James Spader may be the newest actor to play a villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but he is excited to be part of it and for good reason. He explains what drew him to the project at its inception, “I had at the time a 19-year-old son who had always loved comic book films and comic books and throughout my career I have never made a film that any of my kids have been able to really see until they were considerably older. At that time I also had a little three-year-old-son coming along too, and he was already interested in fantasy, so I thought I could finally do something for my boys.”
He adds, “This is a group of people who have worked a lot together and are very familiar with this world. I love coming into this story in the capacity that this character does because he has knowledge of these characters. Ultron is sort of self-created to a degree, with a lot of unintended help from Banner and Stark. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of them and their past and their history and their lives and a general, comprehensive history of mankind and culture, and yet he’s just been born.”
Further describing Ultron’s capabilities, Spader says, “Ultron is able to access anything technological and anything that is available on the Internet has become part of his stimulation and information and embedded in his psyche. I think that's inclusive of even conversation. But it's streaming all the time. He has an ungoverned access to it and it’s constantly streaming into whatever processing chip he has in there somewhere. So it’s overwhelming and almost inconceivable. He has powers and knowledge that are impossible for him to harness and that mixed with a lot of hubris and psychopathic tendencies are formidable. Troubling. He’s too strong for his own good.”
Ultron definitely has The Avengers in his sights for destruction but one Avenger is of particular interest: “Ultron’s perception probably of the world is that Tony Stark is the absolute defining personification of what is wrong with the world today. The Avengers as a whole he looks upon as being reflective of the decline of civilization and all the more so that Tony Stark is responsible for his being, to a degree. Very quickly Ultron becomes a self-created being as he continues to advance and develop and evolve and so on. But in a funny way for other characters also that are introduced in this film, Tony Stark represents a catalyst to the problem.”
Spader had worked in the past with Robert Downey Jr, who reprises his role of Tony Stark (Iron Man) in the film, and they have been friends for many years. It was a ‘tremendous pleasure’ for him to have the chance to reacquaint with Downey Jr.
“We’ve been in different parts of the world for some time now and that happens a lot in the movie business where you have these friends who become very close,” informs Spader. “Our friendship was one of the few I’ve made working as an actor where it was really based on our friendship away from the set. We worked together on a couple of pictures but our friendship was based on a friendship away from that. Then we just have been on different ends of the universe for some time. One of the great pleasures of working on this picture has been finding that friendship again, which happened immediately.”
Working on the film involved new technological challenges for Spader, who had never worked with motion-capture before as an integral element of his performance, but the talented actor stepped out of his comfort zone and embraced the experience. “To be doing something brand-new after decades and decades of working as an actor has been the exhilarating part of it and the incredibly challenging part of it is just that the process itself is indomitable and I like that,” says Spader. “I like that it was brand-new for me and it was also an opportunity to bring life to something in an entirely new and different way than I ever have before.”
This is the veteran actor’s first time working with writer/director Joss Whedon and he says of the experience, “He’s incredibly smart and very funny and eccentric and those are the qualities I like in a person. He brings that to the set, and for me working on a film that’s a gift. If that eccentricity and the idiosyncrasies of the director and the writer importantly inform how you arrive at the end result, that’s great.”
Spader is very articulate when it comes to describing the essence of Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. “It’s an abundant feast for all the senses,” offers the actor. “It’s visually staggering, not just in terms of imagery, but in terms of its size and scope as well. When I read some of the things in the script, it just seemed so enormous. You’d think that there must be some diminishment of that during the process of the making of or even the development of the script, but not so. The stories that matter are small and human and emotional and it’s a juxtaposition of those things because that's how it works.”
Summing up, he adds, “A film can be a magnificent spectacle that's inaccessible in a way so that you can’t crawl inside and feel the discomfort of it or the elation or the joy or the sadness or the melancholy or whatever it may be. But to be able to create this spectacle and have it be something that you can crawl inside and feel the life within, that’s film in its finest form.”
Catch up on the tale so far with the exclusive television premiere of Avengers: Age of Ultron only on Star Movies on 24th April 2016.