Shock took a part of this afternoon to speak to Len Wiseman, the co-creator of the Underworld series, who produced and had a hand in the scripting of Underworld Awakening. Two questions from the fans have been a constant since this film started: Where is Michael? And, where is Scott Speedman?
Inside, we got Wiseman to address those questions and talk about which actor from the past films wanted to be written back in.
If you’ve seen the new film, you know Michael is, in fact, seen in the story. Speedman, however, does not play the role. So, we pressed Wiseman for an official statement about the absence of Speedman. This is what he had to say:
“At one point [in the story development] we were thinking about bringing in Michael into more of the story. It just started to battle and distract from the mother/daughter story with Eve, the new character. It just started happening script-wise. It started to take the importance of Eve [India Eisley] down. You can’t just have Michael in there as a sub-character because he’s so important and if you’re going to have another important character show up, it just washes that relationship entirely. That’s a bit of where it just became what it became. If you got involved in the Michael relationship, it would have overshadowed the new one. With parts one and two, we told, a little bit, of the same relationship story and I didn’t want to do that a third time. If we’re going to do another one, let’s put a different relationship in there. Scott’s a friend of mine and he knew what I was doing from the beginning, we talk every week so it was just, ‘This is the story we’re going with in the third one.'”
I think you can fill in the blanks there and presume Speedman probably didn’t want to come back for a brief amount of screen time. But that’s just a presumption. Wiseman did have an amusing anecdote to share:
“The one actor who did contact me, and we’d love to have him is Bill Nighy. He was like, ‘C’mon, they’re vampires. Can’t you put his head back on?’ I adore the man, but we just couldn’t make that work out.”
Look for our full chat with Wiseman very soon!
(Photo Credit: WENN.com)
