“Amateurish”: the ‘Venom’ scene Woody Harrelson regrets shooting
There’s a temptation among cynical movie fans to assume that actors take paycheque roles, especially once they reach a certain level of fame. When a superstar signs up for a seemingly thankless part in a lowest-common-denominator blockbuster, it’s easy to imagine they aren’t particularly invested in the material. While that might be true more often than not, it’s not always the case—sometimes, actors put far more effort into a role than we might expect.
Take Woody Harrelson, for example. When he agreed to shoot a one-scene cameo in one of 2018’s biggest releases, he gave it his all—only to later admit he felt part of the scene came across as amateurish.
When Tom Hardy’s Venom was released, the big-budget Marvel movie took the grotesque supervillain into the stratosphere. The film made $856million at the worldwide box office, which took everyone by surprise, especially because the movie didn’t have the alien symbiote’s arch-nemesis Spider-Man in it. While the movie was met with scathing reviews, its enormous financial success made a sequel inevitable – although Sony must have already felt one was likely, as it hired Harrelson to make a cameo in a teasing post-credits scene.
In that scene, Harrelson played serial killer Cletus Kasady, better known to comics fans as the villainous Carnage. It amounted to little more than Harrelson appearing in a bizarre curly red fright wig to make a fan-baiting comment about how he planned to cause “carnage”. Comics geeks ate it up, and Sony rubbed its hands in glee at the prospects of an equally lucrative sequel featuring one of Hollywood’s most beloved actors going up against Hardy. However, Harrelson didn’t share everyone’s enthusiasm over his little cameo.
In 2021, while promoting Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Harrelson was adamant that he didn’t treat the cameo as a way to earn an easy paycheque. Instead, he understood the gravity of stepping into the world of Marvel, with its incredibly dedicated fanbase, and he was also intimidated by the prospect of working with Hardy, who he considers “one of the great actors”.
He admitted: “Even though it was only one scene, I certainly felt at the end of it, I could’ve done a much better job.” As hard as it might be to believe, Harrelson claimed he was genuinely nervous when he shot the cameo – something he didn’t dare admit to Hardy – which fostered an environment in which he didn’t feel “free enough to be more creative.”
In addition to his nerves, though, another aspect of the scene rubbed Harrelson the wrong way. “I guess one’s hair pretty much defines a person,” Harrelson mused to IGN. “In the first one, I didn’t like that wig. That was a bit amateurish.”
In truth, Harrelson isn’t wrong. The wig used in the first Venom is exceedingly over-the-top and silly. To give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt, though, it was actually more accurate to the source material than the more realistic one used in the sequel. However, what looks good on the pages of a comic book can sometimes look utterly ridiculous on a real actor, and Harrelson was undoubtedly saddled with an eyesore on top of his head.
Amusingly, though, even though he was given a hairstyle that wouldn’t look out of place in the real world in the sequel, there was still something Harrelson wasn’t quite happy with. “I did think that the wig that I used in this one was going to be a little bit redder than it came out,” he groused in a good-natured manner. “On the other hand, it worked good. It’s just a better wig.”
