‘Hellboy’ Set Visit: 47 Things to Know About Neil Marshall’s Dark, “Grounded” Reboot

By Nick Romano
2 weeks ago

There’s a howl in the night. Somewhere, deep in the dark woods of Bulgaria, a pack of wolves stir. They’re hungry, thirsty, and they’ve just spotted their next meal. The black dogs, with eyes that glow in the moon’s light, swarm on their targets, humans unaware that they are being tracked until the beasts are upon them. And then, just as their tongues lick across their sharpened canines… a lot of “oooo”s and “awww”s ensue.

Members of craft services on the set of Hellboy come out to greet the dogs for some snacks and a whole lot of ear scratching. According to production designer Paul Kirby, they’re just some of the stray dogs that roam the city of Sofia and are tracked by the municipality. With production on the reboot set up in the hills on the outskirts of the capital, the pups are regulars. They come every day to feed on scraps — and the crew is more than happy to oblige for the cost of a head scratch and a few cheek licks.

It’s part of what makes the film set such a strange place. As night falls on a windy August night, so windy that it blows away all effects from the smoke machines pumping mist into the evening air, set pieces like the chicken-legged hut of Baba Yaga and the eery display of Merlin’s Tomb, begin blending into the shadows. Then there’s David Harbour himself, star of Stranger Things, who is rarely seen by even his own cast mates out of Hellboy makeup. There always seems to be a horned red beast of the apocalypse walking about in a trench coat for coffee breaks at any given hour.

It’s all for the benefit of the production, which took up the unenviable task of creating a new kind of Hellboy movie years after director Guillermo del Toro made his two beloved iterations. This Hellboy, a new reboot with a new star and new story, is more horror than fantasy. “It certainly has its roots more in that world of gothic horror,” director Neil Marshall explains to press on set. “I think that’s part of the texture of the film, as well. Quite a bit of it is set in the U.K. and it ties in… It’s taking Hellboy out of his comfort zone that we haven’t seen him in before.”

For producer Lloyd Levin, who’s been involved with Hellboy since the age of Ron Perlman as “Big Red,” it’s now about maintaining the “DNA” of the comics from Mike Mignola — which, inherently, are more R rated. When Hellboy, still a member of the B.P.R.D. (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense) at the beginning of the film, returns to London to deal with a bunch of giants, he’s alerted to the resurrection of The Blood Queen, an evil sorceress with a thirst for vengeance.

“Having a female villain just felt good,” Marshall remarks of casting Resident Evil’s Milla Jovovich in the role. “It felt right and was good that this woman comes around and kicks the shit out of Hellboy.”

Image via Lionsgate/Summit

Instead of John Hurt as Professor Trevor “Broom” Bruttenholm, Hellboy’s adopted human father, it’s Ian McShane in the role. Instead of sidekicks amphibian Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and pyrotechnic Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) from the Del Toro films, it’s B.P.R.D. agent Benjamin Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim) and “human ouija board” Alice Monaghan (Sasha Lane).

“Some people inadvertently refer to it as Hellboy 3 and I desperately want to avoid that,” Marshall says. “I don’t want it to be seen as that. It’s a successor to that. I’d just like people to see it in its own right as a new take on Hellboy, and hopefully an amazing one.”

In exploring the Bulgarian set, here’s a primer for this new era of Hellboy.

Levin says the production approached the reboot like a listical. “[On] some of your websites,” he tells press, “there’ve been some interesting articles about how it should be the same and how it should be different. Right from the get go we had very similar conversations along those lines, where is this the same and where is this different.”
Mignola “was involved in the genesis” of the reboot, according to franchise Levin. Mignola and fellow Hellboy comic writer Chris Golden (Hellboy: Bones of Giants) even worked on a draft of the script together.
The producers settled on an R rating not so much because of the success of Deadpool and Logan, but because of the comic book source material. “The comic books themselves are R rated,” Levin says. “There’s buckets of blood, there’s beheadings, there’s an intensity that equates naturally and organically to the R rating.”
Photo Credit: Mark Rogers.

Hellboy takes inspiration from all different areas of the comics. The antihero will be fighting in a Tijuana boxing ring against a demonic creature (similar to Hellboy in Mexico) when he’s called back to England to hunt giants (similar to The Wild Hunt). “One thing it isn’t is a greatest hits,” Marshall says. “It’s a coherent story but it certainly dips into several different stories that Mignola put together so I suppose it’s a collage of sorts, but we made a through-line that connects everything.”
Hellboy will also feature references to other horror films, but Levin doesn’t want to reveal what they are as “it would maybe be overly suggestive.”
Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman won’t appear in the reboot, per Levin.
Harbour is rarely seen on set out of makeup. Two days in to filming her scenes as Osiris Club seer Lady Hatton, Sophie Okonedo still hadn’t met the real Harbour when he wasn’t wearing his “Big Red” silicon mask.
The team lead by Joel Harlow, the film’s character and makeup designer, crafted six body suits for Harbour to use at any given time. While Harbour wears one on set, the others are maintained. “Some of the hair falls out, so we have to constantly maintain those by re-punching at the end of the day,” he says.
Harbour’s transformation into Hellboy takes less than two hours each day, which, for Harlow, “is incredible for a character this complicated as far as prosthetic makeup goes.” It initially took around three hours, but by the 50th day in a row “it gets considerably faster.”
Harbour’s Hellboy is a hairy guy, which for Harlow goes back to the film’s mission of pulling as much from the comics as possible. “It’s very gritty. He’s very down to earth,” he explains. “I wanted to take it away from a comic book look as possible and grounded in reality. That’s why he’s got hair on his arms and hair on his chest and scars.”
Jovovich’s The Blood Queen will be used to play on Hellboy’s origins. “She raises a lot of issues that are very relatable to a big part of it,” Levin says. “We’re using her to also play into his origin story, his identity story, that she kind of sits on one shoulder and Broom sits on the other in a sense.
Image via Lionsgate

Kim describes Daimio’s relationship with Hellboy as “sticky”: “They’re teammates but they’re not necessarily on the same side. It takes a little while for the two of them to come to a working relationship and by the end they find a good one.”
Daimio’s backstory won’t be explicitly laid out, though flashbacks will be featured and it certainly “informs every scene of his,” Kim says.
Sorry, Daimio fans. His grandmother isn’t a part of this film.
After Skrein stepped down from the role of Daimio over claims of whitewashing a Japanese-American character, Kim “had two whole days and 30 hours on a plane” to prepare for the role. “I did a lot of reading and, thankfully, there’s a lot of source material.”

Levin says Daimio’s origin is a bit a secret, and yet the Hellboy trailers reveal Daimio’s transformation into a were-jaguar. For that, Kim acted through motion-capture. “I just did a session the other day,” he says on set. “I can’t wait to see how it turns out.”
The most “daunting aspect” of taking on Daimio for Kim was the British accent. The character may be Japanese-American in the comics, but he’s British in the film, and Kim “had never done a British accent before.” He adds, “The funny thing is, when I was in drama school, we learned British accents… and I was always excited about being able to learn it but then I thought to myself, ‘When as an Asian-American actor will I be asked to do a British accent?’ Low and behold, Hellboy.”
Per Kim, Daimio’s change from American to British came out of a need to “tighten the world” of Hellboy. “It was [set] in London and Hellboy’s father is British and it just felt like that was the universe they wanted to create.”
For Daimio’s facial scar, another signature from the comics, Harlow and his team “went through changes” to get the design right, something “that worked not only with him in human form but also in were form.” But it couldn’t be too grotesque because “he is a main character so he’s gotta be someone not so off-putting that you don’t want to look at him.” That’s Hollywood.
Image via Lionsgate/Summit Entertainment

According to Kim, the scar was designed for Skrein through “a face cast” before the actor dropped out of the role. “By the time I got here, they were just like, ‘Find something from the bin!’” the actor joked, before quickly clarifying, “No, I don’t mean to make it sound as flippant as that.” He said, “It is interesting, though, to have a manifestation of the conflict that’s inside of him. He’s constantly trying to hide a lot of his true nature so it’s interesting to me that he’s got something inescapable on his face and it affects how he acts in the world.”
The producers were very conscious not to turn Daimio into an Asian trope by making him a martial arts expert. So while paparazzi photos may have looked like Kim was wielding a samurai sword during one particular fight scene, Kim says “it wasn’t really a sword you saw in my hand.” Curiouser and curiouser.
Okonedo didn’t know anything about Hellboy, really, before she joined the production. But her friends did and they all told her she had to do it. As the stage actress describes of Lady Hatton, “She’s fun, it’s big and over the top. She’s seeing the future and she gets killed and comes back to life. She’s blind. She’s got a crystal ball. She’s got white hair. She has fabulous gowns.”
In one scene, Okonedo had to perform with facial capture for when Alice channels the dead spirit of Lady Hatton out of her mouth. As Levin describes of the scene, “Hellboy goes to help the Osiris Club with a situation that they’re having, but he’s betrayed. He returns to the Osiris Club and everyone is dead, as well as Lady Hatton, and they’re trying to get information from her as to exactly what happened.”
This scene will mark a 360-degree shot as Hellboy, Daimio, and Alice listen to Hatton’s spirit warn of The Blood Queen’s resurrection.
Alistair Petrie, who played General Draven in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, takes on the role of Lord Glaren, the leader of the Osiris Club, a secret society “set up to keep an eye on and protect the secret history of England, but also keep an eye on the bad stuff that’s going on.” He says, “They also have an ultimate role… protector role of, I suppose, the future of mankind.”
Lord Glaren “crosses timelines in a way,” Petrie elaborates. “He’s not immortal, per se, but their existence rate has been slowed down to an absolute snail’s pace. So he’s a contemporary character but from an interesting period.”
David Harbour as ‘Hellboy’, Director of Photography Sam McCurdy, Director Neil Marshall, and Alistair Petrie as ‘Lord Alan Glarin’ in HELLBOY.
Photo Credit: Mark Rogers.

Even on set during the film’s production, Levin mentions how the scenes and story are still evolving in certain ways. Example: Petrie mentions how “Glaren could almost say to Hellboy, ‘My haven’t you grown,” which drives kids berserk.” He then decides during the interview, “Hellboy, nice to see you. My haven’t you grown?’ I might throw that in [the scene] there tomorrow.”
Gruagach, the pig-like fairy creature servant to The Blood Queen, played by Douglas Tait in heavy prosthetics, features an animatronic head. He’s got a “cyber-driven mouth, nose, brows, ears.”
Kim was drawn to Hellboy over a conversation with Marshall, in which the director explained his focus to bring as much practical effects to the film as possible. “I can always tell when there’s a disconnect between the actor and the world around him or her,” Kim says.
For the first time in a Hellboy movie, we will get to see Hellboy’s feet. “We figured out a place to put his feet into the film,” Harlow says. “Granted he wears boots for most of it. We’ll get a shot of his cloven hoof feet.”
Harlow designed all the characters in the film, from Hellboy to Gruagach to the witch Baba Yaga, “just to keep things cohesive.”
Harlow also designed plague victims, which he too made from prosthetics. “It oozes, eyeballs pop out, it’s pretty gross, which is great for us,” he warns. “We wanted to do layers and layers of different textures of passings of material so it really looks like the skin is slough and liquifying.”
The film begins in the past, according to Kirby, who created a set for Pendle Hill, a meeting ground for witches and The Blood Queen. In the present, an ancient stone close to the location is now covered in graffiti surrounded by a freshly paved parking lot. The Blood Queen comments on mankind. What have they done to this world?” Kirby says.
Hellboy, known for his signature revolver, gets two guns in the reboot. “He loses [one] quite quickly and then he’s presented with this gun,” says a rep for the prop department, turning his attention to a 1940 Austrian revolver that fires about 38 blanks.
This Hellboy will also be the first Hellboy movie to feature a “blank-firing Hellboy gun.”
Props punched up Hellboy’s main gun with new steel attachments and an enlarged chamber. “It was really difficult for the armorer because this Austrian revolver, he had to make this cartridge chamber from scratch,” the rep explains. “So that’s all steel and in the real gun it’s all steel inside. In order for the mechanism to work, because that was fairly tricky because the gun obviously had a cartridge chamber that was much smaller originally so the mechanism inside had to deal with much more weight when turning each bullet or each spin cartridge.”
Image via Lionsgate

Harbour wanted to film scenes showing Hellboy reloading the gun, but the revolver didn’t work that way. “The whole chamber doesn’t come out… so that was maybe not as elegant as it could’ve been. But you can fake it and work around it.”
In order to resurrect Nimue (a.k.a. The Blood Queen), Gruagach is searching for six crates, each containing various body parts of hers: the head, the torso, the arms, and the legs.
The props team joke Hellboy is “really a movie about wooden boxes… I have those crates new made from wood with steel cladding on them, locking mechanisms. Then I have the same six crates light weight because the guys need to be able to carry them in, one per crate as opposed to two. Then I have another set of crates for the back of the horses. And then all of those crates in old, 1500 years later.”
Kirby used his more than 30 sets to “crank it up a bit so it gets stranger and stranger. They meet the Osiris Club guys and it’s getting weirded.” “Cranked up to 11” is the phrase he used.
A recurring phrase to describe the Hellboy reboot is “grounded fantasy.” For Kirby, “fantasy is better when it’s a little bit more grounded because it looks stranger.” That applies to the character of Hellboy, as well, being “more gnarly, more scarred.”
Kirby tapped into the color palate of the comics for the film, noting how “when you see Hellboy [on the page] he’s the only red color in the frame… When he’s not in the frame, something else is red in the frame.”
Easter eggs run rampant throughout the sets. “If you know your Hellboy, you’ll get the richness from it,” Kirby says.
One such Easter egg lies in the trophy room at the Osiris Club. Spotted in a framed portrait is the image of Mignola himself.
Kirby put up a wishlist of all the goth bands he wanted to highlight in Hellboy, like Sonic Youth, The Cure, and Southern Death Cult. “What music would he listen to?” Kirby mused. “And then we thought, well, maybe there’s a place in time when music… he’d start to see goth music and it spoke to him. ‘These guys are outsiders, they’re like me.’”
Kirby also revamped Baba Yaga’s hut from the comics for the film, with blessings from Mignola. “The legend is that it’s a little house that walks around on chicken legs. In our vision… it’s a huge tower, so it’s got a lot of verticality. It looks different to Mike’s version, but I consulted him about it. ‘What are the key ingredients of it?’ And he just wanted it to be bigger on the inside than the outside in the Tardis way.” Kirby wanted to get away from the “slight comedic element” that comes from seeing a “little house on a chicken leg.” “If this thing appears through the trees,” he says, “you want to see it coming. And then if it approaches, it settles down and it becomes a doorway.”
The producers are already planning for potential sequels in a very “vague sense,” says Levin. “Not in a No. 2 will be this and No. 3 will be that, but you can tell yourself. If this starts with The Wild Hunt, the track is laid from there in the comic books where you could go.”

Hellboy opens in theaters on April 12th. Tickets are on sale now at https://tickets.hellboy.movie/

For more of our Hellboy set visit coverage, peruse the links below:

How ‘Hellboy’ Rebooted the Franchise Without Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman

‘Hellboy’ Producer on the Daimio Whitewashing Controversy: “We Lost Track”

David Harbour on the set of HELLBOY.
Photo Credit: Mark Rogers.

Image via Lionsgate

‘Hellboy’ Set Visit: 47 Things to Know About Neil Marshall’s Dark, “Grounded” Reboot

Latest Feed

Follow Us