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Tom Hardy: 'My favourite 40 minutes of Venom were cut from the film'
Marvel fans may be looking forward to the release of the new superhero movie Venom – but for its star, Tom Hardy, it will be a bittersweet experience.
In an interview with ComicsExplained, Hardy said that all his favourite scenes had ended up on the cutting-room floor. When asked "What was your favourite scene to film?" he said: "Things that aren’t in this movie."
The Taboo star continued, in a possibly tongue-in-cheek reply: "There are, like, 30 to 40 minutes' worth of scenes that aren’t in this movie... all of them. Mad puppeteering scenes, dark comedy scenes. You know what I mean? They just never made it in."
The film, a spin-off from the Spider-Man franchise, tells the origin story of the supervillain Venom, a symbiotic alien creature which takes over the body of a journalist (played by Hardy), and kills its enemies by biting off their heads.
The film's executive producer Matt Tolmach has poured cold water on rumours that the film's most shocking scenes were cut to ensure it would receive a PG-13 certificate in the US.
"There isn't some phantom version of the movie," Tolmach told comicbook.com last week. "Everyone is asking us that. Is there an R-rated cut sitting there? There isn't."
"We only ever talked about this movie as being PG-13," director Ruben Fleisher added. "What I've said in the past is that we wanted to push the violence to the hilt. The Dark Knight was always a huge reference point for me, personally, just as far as how far you could take a PG-13."
The Dark Knight, the 2008 Batman film, received a 12A certificate in the UK but prompted complaints from both Labour and Conservative MPs, with former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith claiming the "relentlessly violent" film was not suitable for children.
Fleisher said he believed he had made a similarly boundary-pushing film. "I'm proud to say [that what] I think I accomplished was to take it to the full limit," he said. "I feel like we don't compromise Venom in any real way. He's as aggressive as fans could possibly hope for, I think."