Ioan Gruffudd recently spoke to the Long Beach Press-Telegram about working on Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Read some excerpts below and check out the entire article here:
What's different this time around?
The first movie was sort of an origin movie, setting up how we became the Fantastic Four. Everybody was a little tentative with the style and how to represent that. We were all so concentrated on telling the story to sell it to a broader audience. This time around, we're firmly established, and we're sort of celebrating the fact that people know and like us now. So we're going to take our time with telling the story and establishing relationships.
Establishing relationships? While the fate of mankind is hanging in the balance?
Exactly; that's the beauty of it. If you're not empathetic toward the characters, you won't really care that they're going to be suffering and that the end of world is nigh. I'm really proud of the fact you're with us throughout the whole movie.
Reed and Sue have a child in the comics.
Yes, Franklin, who has such extraordinary powers to such an extent that they have to keep a lid on him. I'm looking forward, if we do get into a third movie, to maybe have Franklin in our midst. It would be interesting to see if Reed and Sue have to put him out there to save the day, if they're dealing with such a powerful arch enemy that they need his help or do we want to expose our child to that?
In "Rise of the Silver Surfer," Reed's got this speech where he puts a hostile self-important general (played by Andre Braugher) in his place. When you delivered those lines, did you ever think to yourself, "Oh for heaven's sake, I studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. I played Hamlet!"?
(laughs) All that training at RADA helped enormously with doing a movie like this. I think it's such a great moment for the character. You see his final transition coming into the Mr. Fantastic character in the comic book. I may not have a great Shakespearean speech, but that's what I was imagining it was, and I needed to have that gravitas and weight behind it.
