Who Voices Venom In Venom And Venom: Let There Be Carnage?

Eddie Brock’s and Venom’s partnership delighted the world in 2018 when the anti-hero duo got their own solo film. More recently, Eddie and Venom got back to the big screen together in another box-office hit, Venom: Let There Be Carnage. However, while it’s easy to see Tom Hardy is the face and voice of Eddie Brock, some fans are still unsure about who voices Venom in both movies. After all, Eddie and Venom are constantly talking to each other, and the vicious and lower-pitched voice of the alien symbiote doesn’t sound at all like Hardy. So, who voices Venom in Venom and Venom: Let There Be Carnage?

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Who Voices Venom in the Movies?

Image via Sony

The simple and straightforward answer to that question is that Hardy plays both Eddie Brock and Venom, recording all the voice work for the alien symbiote. Even so, it’s curious to notice how Hardy used a specific process to help him play both sides of the dialogues between man and beast on set.

In most recent movies with CGI characters, actors use mo-cap suits to capture their movement and voice at the same time. Venom, however, is a slimy goo that’s completely generated by the digital artists in most of his scenes. When CGI characters are added in post-production, one of the most standard ways of dealing with their voices is recording their lines after the scenes were already shot. Nevertheless, Hardy did the opposite process, recording Venom’s lines before each scene, as a way to help him act in scenes where Eddie and Venom are talking to each other.

Having Venom’s lines ready helped Hardy time his reactions as Eddie properly and allowed the actor to play both sides of the dialogues simultaneously. In an interview for Entertainment Weekly, Hardy explained the process in detail by saying:

“Actually, the sound boys, they worked relentlessly to trigger [it] - I’d have to lay down the vocal for Venom in the morning and then play Eddie opposite in my earpiece, and whoever was working in the scene with me, had to hear Venom at the same time but then ignore that they’d heard Venom. And whenever I gave my cue line as Eddie Brock - this might not make any sense to anybody who’s not really techie and geeky about things like this like me - but Patrick [Anderson] would be under the stage queuing Venom accurately so I could cut across him and talk and argue with myself, and stuff like that. It’s a bit techie, it was fun. It was really, really good fun, and the sound boys, actually, to be fair, probably really play Venom. It’s my voice [laughs], but they play Venom.”

That’s it. According to the man himself, Venom’s voice is as much a product of his own labor as of the work of sound technicians, who used his recordings to reply in real-time as Venom when Hardy was on set. That must be the reason why we can feel the connection between Eddie and Brock in both movies, even though there’s only one flesh-and-bone actor on set.

But what about Venom’s voice? Where does the slow and slimy voice come from? According to Hardy, he searched for many references before deciding which path to follow to make Venom sound comic-accurate and have his own personality. Talking to ScreenRant, Hardy said his references were:

“Redman, Busta Rhymes, and James Brown as ingredients, and then I played with it to create the fusion of sort of what you hear, which sounds nothing like that, but initially was like vibe or heartbeat that I wanted to bring to it. That kind of bombastic, playful, like dark, witty, clever, you know, honest, but with a power familiar friendly sound which is palatable.”

There you go. When Eddie and Venom say “We are Venom”, they are not lying. Both characters’ voices come from the same actor: Tom Hardy.

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