I went to chat to him, and he started talking about the character. Halfway through, I realized he was very much talking about it as my character. We carried on talking about it, got on really well. And I knew that he understood the whole world that my son had already started teaching me about. We finished our cups of coffee and then walked out. I rang my wife, and went, “I think I’ve just been asked to play the villain in the next Marvel movie.”

Your voice is such a great asset. Is it something that have to train regularly?

No, I don’t really. I smoke, and I drink. I don’t do a lot of care for it. It’s not something that I’ve trained my voice to do. Obviously, over 30 years of acting, I have more control over that instrument, or that tool. But it’s still almost the same voice I’ve always had. That comes from my grandma, my dad’s mom. She had a very deep voice, and all her sons did as well. I’m the first one to make it pay.

How did you find Galactus’s voice?

The intent of virtually everything he says is a proclamation. It’s a voice of God, essentially. But I wanted it to sound old, because he hasn’t spoken for millions of years before the events of this film… I wanted it to sound like rocks falling down the side of a mountain. I wanted to try and get this rumble that stayed all the way through the line, even when he’s not saying a word. I was just working on getting my breath as wide and as deep as I could, and I found this deep growl that comes off the back of a breath. And I found a way to turn that growl into speech.

I know it’s hardly your first blockbuster rodeo, but this certainly feels like the biggest scale of film you’ve done. How does that compare to something like the original Office?

Those are tricky ones to compare. We did do The Office at studios, but it was basically an abandoned office block at the studio, so it wasn’t a set, as it were… For instance, the doors of the office, they were the makeup room, and the costume room. The whole production was on one floor of this abandoned office block. Tiny budget, comparatively. Obviously, one cameraman.

But then, if you look at Fantastic Four, filmed at Pinewood Studios, the home of British cinema. It’s a beautiful place, huge… You’ve got maybe six stages taken for the film, loads of warehouses full of guys building these enormous sets, and hundreds of people employed on the crew off set… The scale is not comparable at all. It’s kind of mind-blowing, the scale of a production like Fantastic Four.

Does it still feel surreal to step on a set of that scale?

Last week, it was 30 years from when First Knight came out, and that was the first big film I did. That was at Pinewood as well. I remember the buzz that I got as a 25-year-old, driving through the gates of this iconic place. 30 years on, it’s pretty much the same buzz when you’re driving through the gates. You’re like, “Yes. I’m working at Pinewood. This is cool.”

When Galactus is stomping around in New York, what did that actually look like for you on set?

Galactus is shot like he’s the miniature, rather than him stomping on a miniature city. So I’ve got white boxes for the buildings that I’m putting my hands on; it’s like a white New York City that I’m stomping around. But unfortunately I’m not kicking mini cars around, or stamping on people, and doing the full Godzilla thing.

When he first arrives, he pulls this tree out of the ground, and gives the mud a menacing sniff. I wondered what that actually looked like. I can’t imagine you’re actually holding a miniature tree…

Well, that was a weird thing with that one. They had like a cat litter tray full of mud, with plastic trees in it. I came down, [grabbed a] full handful of it, with the soil coming through my fingers, and gave it a sniff… I don’t know how much of that they used, and how much they then CGI’d what it is, but it looked pretty similar to what I picked up.

You’ve been a frequent collaborator of Robert Eggers. He’s bringing together a cast for his upcoming film Werwulf. Has he tapped you up yet? What have you heard about it?

It’s gonna be amazing. I read the script, it’s brutal. I mean, I think it’s his most brutal and out-there one yet. I love it, it’s really cool. But I’ve no idea whether I’m gonna be doing any work on it or not.

This article originally appeared in British GQ.

Photography by John Russo
Styled by Konca Aykan
Grooming by Amanda Grossman