The Hellboy reboot is set to be the most-accurate portrayal of the character on the big screen to-date. As soon as the reboot was announced, Ian McShane and David Harbour (Stranger Things) jumped on-board as Professor Bloom and Hellboy respectively. The duo breakdown the father-son relationship between the two characters we will see this time around.
The reboot will hold an R-rating, allowing it to stay closer to the comics in many more ways than Guillermo del Toro’s versions did. According to an interview McShane gave Fandom, the dynamic between both characters will have a different dynamic than what we’ve seen:
“You don’t start with the birth of Hellboy, but the relationship between [Hellboy and Broom] is quite crusty. Does he trust his father? [Hellboy asks], ‘Why didn’t you kill me? I’m a monster.’
It’s a little bit of a psychological battle against Hellboy. There’s one important moment in [the film] when [Hellboy] sort of thinks he’s fighting his own people, the outsiders. So, he’s being used by the insiders, which is me, if you like.”
McShane goes on to say that his version is a bit of an homage to John Hurt’s performance as Bloom. The film’s star, David Harbour also spoke to MTV about how difficult it was during the shoot:
“It was the hardest job I’ve ever done. The action that I’m doing in the movie, the rolling around on the ground and punching — things that a 40-year-old man should not be doing — and on top of that, the tremendous amount of prosthetics and makeup, but at the end of the day we would shoot some pretty beautiful stuff. And pretty unique stuff for this type of universe.”
According to Harbour, most of the film was practical effects, with very minimal CGI used.
