She-Hulk: Attorney at Law‘s season 1 finale saw the founder of Intelligencia Todd Phelps, the character who is played by Jon Bass turn into the green monster-sized superhero after injecting himself with She-Hulk’s blood.
But it looks like the Hulk King might have ended up differently, especially with regard to his appearance after turning, as a Marvel VFX artist recently revealed they deliberately made the All Nighter actor’s character look uglier.
Apparently, while working on Todd Hulk, the visual effects team had ended up making him look rather attractive, which is exactly what Marvel Studios didn’t want as the crew was then asked to take it down a notch and not make it look like he was a model for Vogue.
Marvel Wanted John Bass’ Todd Hulk to Look Unattractive
In an interview with Before and Afters, Guy Williams, the Wētā FX visual effects supervisor talked about what it was like working on She-Hulk’s character in the show when he revealed the reality behind one of the characters who made his appearance as Hulk toward the ending. Williams explained how while working on Jon Bass’ Todd Phelps and his Hulk transformation, their team was requested by Marvel Studios to make his character look much less appealing.
“One of the problems we ran into was that we took the actor and made a Hulk version of him to begin with, and the studio came back and said, ‘No, no, no, no, he’s the villain. He has to look bad. He can’t look so good.’”
The Marvel VFX artist joked about Todd looking like “an absolute Adonis” as the Hulk King and mentioned how that was in turn a major challenge the team needed to deal with.
“It turns out that when you take that actor and you make him 7’1″ and give him huge Hulk-like muscles and chisel his face, he turns into an absolute Adonis. He was just way too attractive—that was the challenge we had with Todd.”
Usually, the problems that tend to arise in such situations happen to be the other way around with characters not looking up to the mark, but of course, normal is not how Marvel functions.
This is How the VFX Team Made the Hulk King Look Ugly
Delving deeper into the subject, Williams elucidated just how his team came around to making Bass’ character more unalluring and even repulsive. From ruining his hair to giving him “blemishes and blotches” they certainly didn’t leave any stones unturned.
“We had to make his face really heavily lean into the blemishes and blotches so that he just didn’t look too beautiful. We took his rather good haircut and just messed it up even more as if he had just been rolling around so that he looked a little bit more maniacal.”
Just a while ago, though, Jan Philip Cramer, another popular Marvel VFX artist who also worked on the visual effects on Jessica Gao‘s She-Hulk talked about the array of problems their team had come across concerning Tatiana Maslany‘s character’s CGI. Maybe one of the reasons why Marvel didn’t want one of the Hulks in the show to look so appealing, besides the reason about him being a villain, was because it would’ve ended up overshadowing the protagonist who has already bagged enough criticism with regard to her CGI.
Either way, they definitely achieved what they were aiming for with regard to Todd Phelps.
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is available to stream on Disney+.
Source: The Direct
