Tom Hardy is so 'married' to 'Venom' character, he helped co-write 'Venom: Let There Be Carnage'

The trailer for Venom: Let There Be Carnage gave a lot of fans exactly what they were hoping for from the sequel to the 2018 box office success, Venom. But perhaps no fan had their wishes come true more than the star of the upcoming film, Tom Hardy, who will also be receiving the first-ever writing credit of his career for this project. 

As screenwriter Kelly Marcel (Venom) told Empire Magazine, she wrote the actual script, but it was born out of conversations she'd had with the actor. Not only is Hardy incredibly committed to the characters he plays in both movies — Eddie Brock and the titular alien symbiote, Venom — but he's also deeply invested in what happens to them. 

"It’s not new for him to be this involved. He’s absolutely 100 percent committed to everything that he does," she says about Hardy's involvement. "He’s married to Venom... He loves this character. He’s very involved in what he thinks should happen."

She goes on to add, "He doesn’t get a pen and write... We spent months breaking the story together on FaceTime, riffing on ideas, seeing what worked, seeing what didn’t. Then I took everything we spoke about and holed up somewhere for three months quietly, knocking out a script."

The sequel will see Hardy's Eddie Brock return to his journalistic roots as he faces off against Cletus Kasady, a remorseless, red-haired serial killer played by Woody Harrelson (The Hunger Games), who'd last appeared as Kasady in a brief scene at the end of the previous movie, as Brock prepared to interview him in prison. However, as director Andy Serkis (Black Panther) — taking over from Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) — explains, both men are fascinated with each other, with Kasady using his past to draw Brock closer. (No doubt leading to the creation of the symbiotic Carnage and its eventual bonding with Kasady.) 

"They both had strange upbringings with strange relationships with their parents and their families. And there's an inherent loneliness that they both recognize in each other," says Serkis. "Cletus actually reaches out and will only speak to Eddie Brock. That's at the beginning of the story, we learned that he's the only one he'll speak to. And the cops, therefore, want Eddie to go in and investigate and try and discover where some of the bodies, some of the many bodies of Cletus' victims are."

Of course, that's not the only villain Eddie (and the tater tot-loving Venom) will be going up against. There's also the question of Shriek, played by Naomi Harris (Skyfall), who has the power to control sound often to deadly effect. Seeing as she's Carnage's lover in the comics, there's a chance she might break out of the isolated cell she was spotted in and team up with him. 

"She's a damaged soul and she really has suffered in her childhood, but there is a real vulnerability about her, and she's in a lot of pain… She's been living in isolation for years, years and years," says Serkis of the character. "She's dangerous too and I think she has her own sense of fairness and being just, and I think when that line is crossed, then you see a very, very dangerous, dark side to her, and that's what we wanted to do with the character."

Luckily Eddie will have some form of a support system as Michelle Williams (Fosse/Verdon) and Reid Scott (Why Women Kill) will both be reprising their roles as Eddie's ex-girlfriend Anne Weying and her boyfriend Dan Lewis. 

Venom: Let There Be Carnage will swing into cinemas in the United States on Sept. 24.