The Last Dance’ created the ‘utterly mad’ Venom Horse (exclusive)

When Tom Hardy first learned that Eddie’s symbiote BFF Venom becomes a horse in Venom: The Last Dance, he used emojis to convey his delight (no, not the horse emoji).

“When I gave him the first draft [of the script] and Venom Horse was in it, he just sent me loads of crying laughing and crying emojis,” director Kelly Marcel tells Entertainment Weekly. “He was like, ‘This is brilliant.’ He loved it so much.”

Venom: The Last Dance (in theaters Oct. 25) is the third and final film starring Hardy as Eddie Brock, the investigative journalist who shares his body with alien symbiote Venom. The Marvel movie (that’s kind of but not really in the MCU, and is kind of but not really a comedy) picks up immediately after Venom: Let There Be Carnage with Eddie and Venom as fugitives on the run, following their wacky road trip as they hitch rides across the country in many different ways. Venom Horse is just one of the”vehicles” they take over, but it quickly became everyone’s favorite (you can see why in EW’s exclusive clip above).

It’s not just the idea of Venom becoming a horse that delighted Hardy so much — this is the first time Venom inhabits an animal in the film trilogy, after all. But it’s also how Venom Horse acts as a character in its own right. “If you slow Venom Horse down, you’ll see that he’s got this crazy wild look on his face,” Marcel says. “He’s utterly mad.”

A flash of the new creature debuted in the film’s first trailer and instantly took the internet by storm. It had an equal effect on Hardy and the rest of the cast and crew when they read about it in the script. “The line in the script, after he turns into Venom Horse, is: ‘Eddie climbs aboard, and Venom Horse gallops like absolute steaming f— across the desert, while he holds on for dear life,'” the director reveals. “That was the sentence, and then we had to make it real.”

A lot of work went into developing and troubleshooting the scene before it was actually shot. The director and Hardy worked with artist Karl Lindberg, who created the first picture of what Venom Horse would look like. Then storyboard artists Jake Lunt Davies and Robert Consing put together “scratch drawings” that Marcel calls “brilliant, proper art” before beginning previsualization (or “pre-vis”), which is a rough animation of the scene.

“When Kelly sent me a script and a line said, ‘Eddie climbs aboard and Venom Horse gallops like absolute steaming f— across the desert while he holds on for dear life,’ I thought, ‘This could be good fun,'” production VFX supervisor John Moffatt tells EW. “But the first parts of the pre-vis didn’t really nail the aforementioned ‘steaming f—‘ component — it just was not fast enough.”

The director’s notes were actually, “It should be really, really fast and stupid,” Moffatt remembers. So he took inspiration from Formula One race cars, and another famous alien: the Man of Steel. “We had the idea of maybe the camera can’t keep up,” Moffatt says. “So we lifted a shot from Superman, and it’s got a little bit of the Road Runner kind of feeling about it from the cartoons. And there are shots that are all a direct lift from the motorcycle sequence in the streets of San Francisco in the first movie, which we thought was quite a fun idea.”

But, it turns out, not even a motorcycle was fast enough. They ended up speeding up footage of a motorcycle racing across the desert in Spain to finally get the right velocity. Then they faced another problem. “Kelly wanted the thing to be massive, but if we made the horse really, really massive, it made Tom look really, really tiny, which was weird,” Moffatt says. “So we found that it was really, really helpful for the horse to kick up a load of dust and debris to convey a sense of speed while still making sure this thing looks like it’s got mass. We worked really hard with [VFX supervisor] Dave [Lee] and the animation team at Double Negative to try and convey that sense of mass, and added some subtle camera shake to it to try and really drive that home.”

Once all the pre-vis development was finished, it was time to shoot the thing. “First day on set, we arrived, and it was very, very hot, and we have a real horse standing there,” Marcel says. “And we just shoot the scene in order, from Tommy coming down the hill, touching the horse, and then you shoot it with the horse rearing up.”

Of course, a handler was on call to make sure the scene was shot humanely, and the horse did its job and leaped up when needed. “The horse was great, actually,” Moffatt says. “We use that little leap, and then we incorporated this more characterful roar, which may or may not have been referencing a certain dinosaur movie.”

And let’s not forget Venom Horse’s equally important scene partner, Eddie, who had to ride this wild alien creature somehow. The director laughs at how they “flung” Hardy around a lot in this movie, especially for this moment, since Venom isn’t particularly careful with his human host. “Poor guy,” Marcel says. “Tommy has to act next to nothing, stand there touching something that isn’t actually there, and react to a thing that isn’t actually happening. Then we put Tommy on wires, and we fly him up onto the back of like a bucking bronco thing from a cowboy bar. We flew him up and slammed him onto the back of one of those.”

The director adds that Hardy loves to do a lot of the stunt work himself, even if that means getting thrown around in multiple locations. “As soon as that horse takes off, it becomes a CGI horse,” Marcel says. “We then go to a stage with a blue screen, and we put Tommy on more wires on the back of a fake horse and then blow tons and tons and tons of wind at him and make him fly. He’s flying Superman style, holding on to what are supposed to be tendrils.”

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Once all the VFX was added on top of the practical shots, the filmmaking team wanted to make sure that Venom Horse got the moment it deserved in the movie. “Rather than it being this Zack Snyder thing where we see it flying past the camera, Kelly really liked the idea of transitioning into a slow-motion moment,” Moffatt says. “Then we could really showcase the cool creature and see Tom hanging on the back for dear life. It’s quite ridiculous — the shot of Tom where he’s getting slapped around by the tongue of the horse is quite a funny moment.”

Hardy’s reactions as Eddie tries to survive this horse ride from hell are just the cherry on top, all set to Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help” featuring Morgan Wallen. “We laughed so much during the making of this,” Marcel says. “The first time I saw that horse, I just was on the floor laughing because he was so funny. Even in the rough early stages of it, you could really tell that this thing looked utterly mad and chaotic, and like it was having the time of its life. And it just continued to get funnier and funnier and funnier.”

But there are still some surprises about this scene that the director doesn’t want to spoil before audiences see it in the movie. “What you haven’t seen in the trailer is the things that Venom is saying to Eddie during this insane ride,” Marcel says, “and the argument that they’re having with each other about how insane this thing is that’s happening.”

Can you blame them?