‘Avengers: Infinity War’: How Red Skull Was Redesigned Without Hugo Weaving

Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War was chock full of surprises for fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe ever since it kicked off in 2008 with Iron Man. There were nods to the entire MCU that made fans cheer with glee, and fewer surprises were more exciting than seeing Red Skull return after disappearing in Captain America: The First Avenger. 

The only difference here is that actor Hugo Weaving decided not to return to play Red Skull, and The Walking Dead star Ross Marquand instead donned the red makeup as the Keeper of the Soul Stone on Vormir. Thanos (Josh Brolin) and Gamora (Zoe Saldana) meet Red Skull there to retrieve the Soul Stone, which leads to Thanos sacrificing the soul of Gamora in exchange for the stone.

IGN spoke with Kelly Port of Digital Domain and Dan DeLeeuw of Marvel Studios to discuss the process in which Red Skull was recreated for Infinity War despite not having Weaving return:

Kelly Port: There’s definitely kind of a wide spectrum of designs in terms of what he would look like. Because it would be… do we get Hugo and put him back in makeup, and try to do it that way? But then he was teleported by the Tesseract, out of The First Avenger, to Vormir, so he was this kind of otherworldly thing. It was some version of the artwork where the Tesseract did very bad things to his appearance, so he was much more skeletal. We did kind of end up in this place that was kind of a place in between, and showed both that the Tesseract did affect him and choose him in some kind of way to be this character on Vormir to give you the rules of the Stone, and kind of went from there.

The original design with Weaving as Red Skull from The First Avenger was still used as a reference point for the design in Infinity War even before Marquand came in.

Kelly Port: What’s great with Marvel is, because it is a shared universe, you’ve got this extensive library of any character you want,” said Port. “If you wanna go back to the first Iron Man, you go back to the first Iron Man, you get the armor for it. If you wanna go back to The First Avenger, you get the scans of Hugo in makeup, right? So any time we work with a character, we’ll photograph and scan them. So we can start from that as a starting point, and then basically modify that look until we got to Red Skull in the final version of the film.

Do you like the cohesion of Red Skull designs between Hugo Weaving from The First Avenger and Ross Marquand in Avengers: Infinity War? Sound off in the comments below, and be sure to continue following Heroic Hollywood for all the latest news in the MCU.

Here is a tentative synopsis for Avengers: Endgame: 

A culmination of 22 interconnected films the fourth installment of the Avengers saga will draw audiences to witness the turning point of this epic journey. Our beloved heroes will truly understand how fragile this reality is and the sacrifices that must be made to uphold it.

Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, Avengers: Endgame is expected to star Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Don Cheadle, Tom Holland, Chadwick Boseman, Paul Bettany, Elizabeth Olsen, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Danai Gurira, Letitia Wright, Dave Bautista, Zoe Saldana, Paul Rudd, Jeremy Renner, Brie Larson, Josh Brolin and Chris Pratt.

Avengers: Endgame is scheduled to be released in theaters on April 26, 2019.

Source: IGN