Jamie Foxx as Max Dillon/ Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, that releases on May 1

Oscar winner Jamie Foxx plays Oscorp engineer Max Dillon who evolves into the evil Electro, Spider-Man’s friend-turned-foe in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, that releases in India on May 1. A chat with the Django Unchained man on being Electro and working with Andrew Garfield.

Who is Electro?

Before you get to Electro, you have to start with Max Dillon, the character in the comic books. He’s a 42-year-old guy who was married at one time, but his wife left him. He’s an electrical engineer, he lives with his mom who’s very doting, but doesn’t let him grow. So after 42 years, he just hasn’t gotten his life together.

Having that back story was fantastic as an actor, because when you agree to do a role like this, the question is: ‘Are there going be moments where we get a chance to act?’ And luckily, that’s exactly what [director] Marc Webb wanted, because it allows the CGI and everything else to be the add-on and not the life of the story.

So getting with Marc and the writers, I said: ‘No one ever utters Max’s name, but how can we take it even further than that?’ So we came up with the idea that no one remembers his birthday, especially his mom, which really hurts him.

I thought that was a great jumping-off point for Max Dillon to become Electro, because a lot of times these movies get going and you don’t really know where all the venom and anger come from. In this case, we get an opportunity to look back at his history. He’s betrayed by his mom, by society and by his job. And people can relate to that — your family betrays you, your love betrays you and then your job is messed up. When those three switches trip, it would throw anybody into weird, murky water. And so we capture the fact that no one says his name ever, and then all of a sudden Spider-Man says: ‘Hey, Max, you’re my friend, you’re my eyes and ears out here’. He takes that like he’s been in the desert all his life and someone gives him a thimbleful of water. More like a swimming pool, actually.

And so, when he goes off the deep-end and turns into Electro, his main thing is: ‘I don’t want to hurt people. I just want Spider-Man to own up to calling me his friend’. So that’s why he becomes Electro, because he feels like: ‘Well, forget it, then. If you won’t be my friend, and all these people think I’m weird or strange, I’ve got this power and I’m going to do harm with it now’.

How does he get the power?

He works as an electrical engineer for Oscorp, designing an electrical grid. But he’s really just the help.

He has an accident?

He falls into this big tub of eels that Oscorp is probably doing all types of experiments with. He gets the power and then his journey is learning how to use the power and how to make the power work for him.

It feels like there’s something about the character’s storyline that relates to the issue of bullying.

There’s definitely that. You look at the world we live in now and how bullying has changed the game. My daughter worked on the anti-bullying campaign at her high school. If she said somebody’s bullying, I would want to drive down to school to deal with it. And she would say: ‘No, they’re not actually here, Dad, they’re on the Internet’. I was shocked. When I was growing up, dealing with bullies sharpened my comedy skills. I was the best comedian in the world. You get the bully to laugh or you get beat up.

It feels like Max is a guy we can relate to as someone who has been pushed around.

Yes, but there’s another aspect to him. There’s something not quite right with him. To me, it’s almost a questioning of the gods, like... ‘Everybody else got dealt a great hand, so what happened to me? Why wasn’t I cute and why didn’t I have a girlfriend?’ So, it’s on another level. Because he’s mad from within. So sure, there’s a bully, that’s the catalyst, but it’s also something going on inside Max.

What’s it like playing a villain? You haven’t really done that before.

I’ve never played a real villain. I’ve played bad guys. Like I was a bad guy in Dreamgirls, and when asked: ‘Should we soften him up?’

I said, ‘No. I want to be a real music dude and real music dudes don’t care about artistes’. But playing a villain in this sense, you get to colour outside the lines. You get to say the cool lines. I asked the director to let me ad-lib stuff and I came up with: ‘Itsy-bitsy spider went up the water spout... down came Electro and wiped the spider out!’

So then I said: ‘Now, I’m gonna try something’ and I turned my back and just whistled the melody…. So all that kind of stuff I could do as the villain, because there are no parameters. As the good guy, there are parameters, but that’s what makes the good guy better when the villain is so crazed. I really enjoyed that, because not all villains have the cool factor. The suit I wore almost reminds you of a Lamborghini and I was thinking: ‘Wow, that’s really cool!’

And you’re blue! Was it a super-long process to get into your costume and make-up?

It was, especially at first, because we had to take four cracks at it to try to figure out which was the right colour. We finally did the blue and everybody thought at first it was too blue, but the make-up artist said: ‘I think this is gonna work’. And that turned out to be the version that everybody was really drawn to.

What was Marc Webb like as a director?

The man is great. Dealing with the scope and the budget of this film, and that’s daunting… To have to tell the story of all these people. The entire cast and crew were constantly making demands on him, and he was able to juggle all of that and also understand what the music is going to be about and everything else.

And he challenged me on the acting. You know, it wasn’t like a walk in the park. He really wanted me to get this. And so I thought that was fantastic for the movie because when you can really push your actors into nailing the performances, then when the explosions and everything else comes, it’s just the cherry on top.

Tell us about working with Andrew Garfield.

Andrew Garfield, man! What’s great about him and what makes this really cool is the fact that he takes the acting approach. It’s not just: ‘I’m gonna get in the suit and let the suit talk’. He really breaks down the scenes… he wants to go back and forth to understand where we are going to be, not just in this scene, but how it relates to the future and even further, if there are more movies down the line. So that’s what you want… a person who doesn’t take it for granted. Because I’ve worked in situations where people’s attitude is, ‘I’m just a fly dude’. But to have something this big, where a lot is riding on it, you need a person who understands not just the outer layer, but the inside of the characters. That’s what we had with Andrew.

And did you read comic books as a kid?

Yeah. We’d read comic books. One thing that stuck out for us was the Spider-Man series on The Electric Company because it was very kid-friendly and, you know, we see Spider-Man shoot the webs and at that time, we thought: ‘Oh, my god, how’d they do that?’ Then you get older and you actually see it’s just somebody throwing a bag of rope and you think: ‘What the heck?’ But those characters were fantastic.

DID YOU KNOW?

Divergent girl Shailene Woodley was initially cast as Mary-Jane Watson and even shot for a few scenes (with Andrew Garfield, in picture above), but her role was edited out when the makers realised that the film would benefit by only keeping Gwen Stacy (played by Emma Stone) as Spider-Man’s love interest.

Sony Pictures announced the release date of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 a good 11 months before the release of The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)!

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is the longest ever Spider-Man film. Total running time? 142 minutes.

Director Marc Webb’s vision for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has been “to create a universe that can withstand and anticipate future story lines while also working in and of itself for one movie”.

Will Jamie Foxx make a good Spider-Man villain? Tell t2@abp.in