Before taking on the character of Superman, Henry Cavill starred in the lead role in the 2011 movie, Immortals. He plays the role of a mortal Theseus, who gets chosen by the gods to fight against King Hyperion. Alongside Henry Cavill, the film stars Stephen Dorff, Mickey Rourke, Joseph Morgan, and more.
Apart from showing Henry Cavill’s talents to the world in full brightness, Immortals also helped him prepare for what was to come in his future – green screens. Filming in front of a green screen has almost become a necessity these days, especially with the kind of projects Henry Cavill takes up. The actor talks about how his stint in the Tarsem Singh-directed film affected his career later on.
Henry Cavill Talks about Working with Green Screens on Immortals
A year ago, Henry Cavill sat down to have a discussion about the wide variety of roles he has done in his career in an interview with GQ. The actor discussed his performances in projects like, Man of Steel, Enola Holmes, The Witcher, and Mission: Impossible among a few others.
Cavill then came to the topic of Immortals, where his character, Theseus, fought against Mickey Rourke’s King Hyperion. You might remember Rourke from Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man 2 where he played Whiplash.
Talking to GQ, Cavill stated that his time on Immortals helped him prepare for future roles. How? Well, since the film’s production involved a ton of green screen usage, it proved to be a learning moment for the actor. Cavill would go on to work in projects that heavily utilize the green screen and if it was not for Immortals, he probably wouldn’t get the hang of it so easily.
“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 discombobulating. When it came to Immortals, it was a good warm-up for the rest of it.”
Unfortunately, the film went on to receive mixed to unfavorable reviews from the critics and has a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 49%. It faced sharp criticism for its storytelling and could have thrown a wrench in Cavill’s fast-growing career. While there were a few who saw the good in Immortals, many agreed with critic Robert Ebert when he called it the “best-looking awful” movie of all time.
Henry Cavill on the Realistic Sets of Immortals
Apart from using green screens, the film also utilized elaborate sets as well as incredible attention to detail that made it so much easier for the actors to work. Talking to Collider, Cavill recalled how some sets were so realistic that if you looked at them long enough, you’d actually feel yourself transporting into that fictional world.
“The sets were absolutely fantastic and elaborate and that helps us as actors, if I might speak for myself, helped me as an actor enormously because we had our immediate surroundings and they were so well designed with such a fantastic attention to detail that you could quite easily, if you turned your back to the green screen portion and you just faced, say, the village set, it literally felt like you were there! There were little things burning and it smelled like it was not in a studio. It was all really, really well done. It made an enormous difference to all of our performances, I believe.”
It looks like Cavill has no regrets about signing up to play the lead in the film despite the negative feedback from its viewers. At the box office, Immortals grossed $226 million on a budget of an estimated $75 million.
Immortals is available to stream on Netflix.
Source: GQ
