Jeremy Renner will be taking on the role of Detective Twitch Williams in Todd McFarlane's Blumhouse adaptation of Spawn, starring Jamie Foxx as the titular antihero. The casting news comes almost two months after the announcement that Foxx would be headlining the movie. As our own Haleigh Foutch wrote at that time, "Foxx will star as the character McFarlane originated in the comics, Al Simmons, aka Spawn, a former member of the CIA black ops who is betrayed by his team and murdered, whereupon he’s promptly sent to hell for killing innocents in the field. In hell, he makes a deal to exchange his soul in order to see his wife again, only to realize that once he’s returned to Earth, he’s stuck in a demonic getup and his wife has already moved on with his best friend. Brutal, kinda heroics and celestial battles ensue. Michael Jai White previously played the role on screen in the 1997 adaptation."
"As a first time director, I wanted to surround myself with the most talent and the most skilled people I can on all fronts. I was lucky enough to land Jason Blum and then Jamie Foxx, and I knew the person on screen the most is this police officer, Twitch Williams. We needed as strong a person as possible because he will be the face of the film. I took my naïve Hollywood approach again, and said let’s start at the top and work down. Jeremy was at the top. I’m a huge fan of his. The character doesn’t need to be a bodybuilder or GQ handsome. I was looking for somebody who’s a person you’ve met before; I needed someone who can pull off the grief of an average human being. I’ve seen Jeremy do that in more than a few of his movies. He was at the top of my list, just like Jamie.”
That feels a little like a backhanded compliment, but sure! McFarlane went on to praise the actor's work in The Hurt Locker and Wind River, saying of the latter, "There was a sense of melancholy to that character that is important and that was a movie also made by a first time director, but one who wrote the thing and so wasn’t nervous about trying to get what you want. Jeremy had the experience of working with the first timer and saw that if you put a good crew together, the whole is way better than the parts and you don’t have to worry.”
Jason Blum echoed McFarlane's thoughts, saying: “Jeremy is the ideal choice for Twitch Williams. He radiates honesty, intelligence and a hard-working, everyman charisma, the same qualities that make Twitch such a compelling character.”
In terms of his overall vision, McFarlane has spoke in the past about wanting to make hard-R movie that doesn't explain much in terms of backstory: "The scariest movies, from Jaws to John Carpenter’s The Thing, or The Grudge and The Ring, the boogeyman doesn’t talk."
