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Director Paul McGuigan’s “Victor Frankenstein” is out this week on Digital, soon to be followed by a DVD & Blu-ray release.
The film stars James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe in a dynamic and thrilling twist on a legendary tale. Radical scientist Victor Frankenstein (McAvoy) and his equally brilliant protégé Igor Strausman (Radcliffe) share a noble vision of aiding humanity through their groundbreaking research into immortality. But Victor’s experiments go too far, and his obsession has horrifying consequences. Only Igor can bring his friend back from the brink of madness and save him from his monstrous creation.
In the lead up to the release, we spoke to co-star Freddie Fox about his role as Finnegan and working with McAvoy, Radcliffe & McGuigan.
Who is Finnegan and how does he fit into the story?
Finnegan is a very wealthy young man. He is a child of wealth. I kind of created a lot of backstory for him that you don’t get in the movie. I imagined that his grandfather, had been a munitions manufacturer for the Duke of Wellington and the British Army, in the Napoleonic wars, and then his father was a General. There’s a lot of great inherited money there, and Finnegan’s ambition is to create an Übermensch that is so powerful that it completely transforms war as we know it, kind of like a Victorian nuclear bomb. He wants to expand the realms of the British Empire to the edges of the world – he has a small world domination ambition (laughs). He wants the recognition that goes with that, the fame and the glory. But he needs Frankenstein and Igor’s medical genius to bring this dream to reality, and then has Machiavellian plans to kill them when it’s all done and in his hands.
He’s not in the novel, is he?
He’s not in the novel. He’s a [Max] Landis creation. He’s really grounded in the psyche of the psychopath, and I think that was for me where my research began, looking into the mentality of psychopaths.
Is the film set slightly later than the novel was?
Yes. I think the novel was written in 1815, or something like that. By making it a touch later, it makes all the science infinitely more plausible. There was an upheaval, not only in industry, but in science and what people were prepared to do. Where God had gotten in the way before, people were now more prepared to challenge that mind-set that had existed ever since the dark ages. Actually, that affects the story, and also the costumes and production design, they had much more to play with, so it’s extraordinary to look at.
Do you think the film honors the novel?
I think it does honor the novel. It honors the core: the modern Prometheus. The similarities are in Frankenstein’s ambitions to create life, the monster, but the book largely focuses on the relationship with the monster, and Igor doesn’t exist in the novel. It’s much less about creation and master, and much more of the creating the creation, which is kind of breezed over in the novel. He just does it, and then you have the monster and their relationship. This is much more about creating that creation, and the reasons for that, and the morals of that. I think the morally ambiguous lines are less blurred in our movie than they are in the novel.
Paul McGuigan has already modernized one classic with Sherlock. Does that stand in him good stead to do the same with Victor Frankenstein?
Yeah, he was absolutely the right director for this. Not only because he is cinematically a great director, but it’s because he has a really great track record in making our favorite old stories into something even more thrilling.
How has it been working with Daniel Radcliffe?
With Dan, he’s a little master. He’s an excellent actor, a character actor, and you see that with every role he plays; he just gets better and better. I remember the first scene I did was in Frankenstein’s office, which was an amazing set, created at Ealing studios, and I was watching some of his and James’s stuff, before I went on set with mine, and his physicality was just incredible. What he achieves to make Igor’s hunch, and his hump, come to life is amazing. And he doesn’t make it comedic in any way but totally truthful and real. It was something totally different, and really impressive, and on top of that he’s just a lovely dude, and a great professional.
What about James McAvoy?
Yeah. James and I, we come from a more similar school of theatre. He’s so wonderfully energetic, and inspiringly so. With his Victor, you see someone who’s almost Aspergic in their desire, and their creative energy and drive. He pushes what you can do on film right to the very limit, but just elegantly stays inside the line. It’s another very good performance – from what I’ve seen of it. Working with him, he gives you everything, like a theatre actor would, and on screen he just keeps it the right side of the line. It’s an incredibly good example of great film acting.
There was some pretty extreme weather during the course of your filming. Did that affect you?
It’s certainly fair to say that the weather was pretty extreme, yeah (laughs). When we were doing the castle sequence, which is the denouement, it has to be a big storm, to bring the monster alive with lightening. God didn’t disappoint on that day (laughs). He really let the heavens open, and the winds go crazy. So on top of real rain and wind, we had fake rain and fake wind, and explosions and mud being splattered everywhere, and I was trapped underneath a massive fallen crane, on my front, being rained on and muddied on – it was absolute hell, to make that end sequence really come to life, for all of us. But truly memorable, too.
Paul decided to use a real actor to play the monster as opposed to using CGI or motion capture techniques. Does that pay off?
Like so much of the set and the models, the monster is wonderfully real. He’s a lovely, enormous, French actor, seven-foot tall, called Guillaume [Delaunay]. He is put under six hours’ worth of makeup, with latex and bodysuits to bulk him out, and make his head look bigger, but the great thing is that he’s an actor. He’s a really great character actor, and the monster looks absolutely incredible. With Gordon, which is the monster we see at the beginning – one of Frankenstein’s early creations – that is an animatronic monster, and it makes it so much more lifelike. When Spielberg did Jaws, that first movie was fantastic because there was something really there, and it was weird, it was tangible. Every Jaws film after that, they tried to computerize the shark with CG effects and it never worked so well, whereas we have gone back to that old school of using actors covered in amazing costumes and using animatronics that have been created by real masters, and I think it will look so much better for that.
Did you have much to do with Jessica Brown Findlay?
Well, yes, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise! I also did a movie with her called The Riot Club, and I got to know her a bit then, but because she was playing a very beaten about waitress that gets abused by this ghastly group of ten Oxford grads, we didn’t spend that much time together – it was more of a boys’ movie. With this we got to spend a lot more time together, and we got to know each other really well. Not only is she beautiful, but again, it’s the same with Dan and James, she’s an amazing actress, and you want to feel, when you’ve finished the movie, that all across the board the performances and the effects and the design is going to come up to grade A, and it certainly is.
Sum up Victor Frankenstein from your point of view.
‘A great privilege’ would be the fairest explanation of it. It was a movie at the very beginning that I didn’t expect to get. I put myself on tape for Frankenstein, for James’s part, which didn’t happen, obviously. Yet it obviously caught Paul’s eye, and Finnegan seemed to be the right choice for me – a better fit – and so I was really lucky, and so grateful to Paul that he had the vision to place me in another part within the same film. Working on it was just awesome, and when you dive in for two days a week for 10 weeks, you see such amazing changes over the course of the shoot. I’ve witnessed something really rather special, I think.
Thanks for your time Freddie!
“Victor Frankenstein” arrives this week! Own it or rent it on Digital now. Get it here on iTunes. Available on Blu-ray™ & DVD May 25.
