![]() One of Glover’s inspirations was to speak Grendel’s dialogue in Old English, adding to the character’s otherworldliness. Those were all very good things to get to play.” And then I return to my mother, played by Angelina Jolie, who brings Grendel a fair amount of solace. Then I meet up with the king, who’s played by Anthony Hopkins, and I have a fair amount of confusion about that relationship. Robert Zemeckis had the good suggestion that all the actions I take are an immediate reaction to pain, because there’s a certain amount of physical trouble to this character. And I have to go down and do something to them and stop it. “It was very apparent that there was a sympathetic side to the character,” the actor says, “and there was always the element of his ear being pained by the noise that these creatures-the humans-down below are making. Providing both the voice and movements of this new Grendel is Crispin Glover, who reveals that a certain compassion for the marauding beast was on the page from the beginning. While enormous in size and deformed of features, he is also a tormented, at times pitiable being-a confused, disruptive child in a violent monster’s body. Accordingly, his first foe has been reconceptualized as well: Grendel, the scourge of the realm of King Hrothgar who has previously been dramatized as either human and utterly inhuman, now combines elements of both. Beowulf, the epic poem dating back to around (and perhaps well before) the 10th century, has now been completely reimagined by Robert Zemeckis, scriptwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary and an army of digital technicians as a CGI/performance-capture epic that adds new psychological levels to its creature-slaying titular hero. ![]() Įven one of the oldest monsters in the history of narrative storytelling can bear a little revisionism when the occasion calls for it. Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on November 16, 2007, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files. ![]()
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