Apparently, Eddie Redmayne got cast in the latest from Aardman studios thanks to a Sean Bean movie (a horror film called Black Death) while Graham Norton was key to Tom Hiddleston being cast.
Nick Park is not only the Oscar-winning director behind new film Early Man (check out our interviews with its stars Maisie Williams and Rob Brydon) but he is also the creator of the iconic characters Wallace and Gromit.
With a career that spans 30 years, Park has developed an ear for actors he wants to star in his feature films. He decided that he wanted to work with Hiddleston, not after The Night Manager or Thor, but rather after hearing him do impressions on an episode of The Graham Norton Show.
“I needed someone who could do accents, so when I saw Tom doing De Niro in front of Robert De Niro, I thought, ‘He’d be worth a look’," Park said. "Tom is very clever, and he can do anyone. I couldn’t use them, but he does a fantastic Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.”
He told The Scotsman about how they experimented between French and English accents: “at one point we did ask Tom Hiddleston to do an English voice, just to see if that would calm things, and take away a sense of a particular political stance. But an English villain felt too obvious and typical. And it was just funnier when Tom was French. Even StudioCanal said, ‘Oh, it’s a pity you lost the French accent.’ So we changed it back again.”
You can see the inspiration in question below, with Hiddleston impersonating the likes of Owen Wilson, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Norton himself:
