“Where were the emotions?”: Marvel VFX Supervisor Reveals Taika Waititi Refused to Use Morgan Freeman-Like Character For Eternity in Thor 4 to Focus on Emotional Scene

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Morgan Freeman as God is one of the most common Hollywood movie castings, and it’s always beautiful every time he gets to play the divine being watching from above. However, it seems like Thor: Love and Thunder missed out on having Freeman’s God in the movie, or someone similar.

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Thor: Love and Thunder is a multi-million dollar blockbuster from Marvel, and also the fourth installment in the Thor movies set in the MCU. This one scene in particular, where Eternity appears, seemed to involve almost no dialogue from one of the most powerful beings in the Marvel comics, which was kind of hinting that Eternity might be speechless for future appearances too, but it could’ve been different.

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Eternity

A Must-Read: ‘Taika Waititi, are you scared?’: God of War Ragnarök Fans Troll Thor: Love and Thunder, Claim Taika Waititi Has Butchered the Old Gods With Fake Lore

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Eternity Was Supposed To Speak in Thor: Love and Thunder

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Eternity first made its appearance in the MCU with Guardians of the Galaxy, although in the form of temple murals. But it was in the latest Thor movie that we got to see the abstract entity make its big-screen debut in theaters.

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Eternity in the comics

Speaking about that scene in Love and Thunder, Gorr the God Butcher can be seen in Eternity’s realm by using Thor’s Stormbreaker to complete his vision of the demise of all gods.

Related: “The entire movie should’ve been cut”: Taika Waititi Faces Further Criticism as Thor: Love and Thunder Atrocious Deleted Scene Involving a Major Greek God Gets Released

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In that particular scene, Eternity is simply just sitting, with not even a single word of dialogue coming out from the cosmic entity. However, that wasn’t always supposed to be the case, according to Love and Thunder’s VFX Supervisor Jake Morrison.

Speaking with ComicBookMovie’s Josh Wilding, Morrison revealed that they were indeed considering someone to play the role of Eternity-

“Well… it certainly we went through a lot of different options to get to that. But I think we all kind of felt that sometimes, you know less is more really. And so, you either go fully realized… and I was asking that the filmmakers like, ‘Are we gonna cast somebody for this? Is this ultimately gonna, be you know, like Morgan Freeman’s playing God again? … Are we going to do that, because if we are, I’d like to know sooner, so I can go and get scans and things like that.’”

However, Morrison continues to reveal that director Taika Waititi wanted the scene to be “the moment” for Thor, Jane Foster, and Gorr and that Eternity speaking would just be a distraction-

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“And they just really felt that… I thought this was super smart… This Taika [Waititi] and the gang at Marvel, that that moment really… belongs to the three actors. And if you suddenly stuck another big CG creature in there who’s gonna you know throw out a bunch of dialogue… it could distract from a heavy, emotional scene, frankly.”

While it is pretty clear that no one’s too bothered by not having Morgan Freeman or someone similar in Thor: Love and Thunder, it would’ve been pretty neat to have him cast as Eternity, or at least another actor of similar caliber.

Also Read: “There’s so much drama and insanity around Gorr”: Christian Bale Reveals He Was Forced to Play Gorr in Thor: Love and Thunder by His Entire Family

Marvel Gave Freedom On How To Portray Eternity In Thor: Love and Thunder

It would be a monumental task to portray a character with a lot of power like Eternity in Thor: Love and Thunder, while also maintaining the idea of it being a character that doesn’t like to speak.

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Continuing the same interview with ComicBookMovie, Jake Morrison reveals how Marvel helped them portray a character shrouded by mystery.

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Eternity as seen in Thor: Love and Thunder

Related: “We would’ve lost his performance”: Kevin Feige Feebly Defends Taika Waititi’s Version of Gorr the God Butcher in Thor 4, Says Comic Accurate Version Would’ve Hampered Christian Bale

Morrison continued speaking about Eternity and said that Marvel gave them the leverage of choosing their way of portraying the character in the movie-

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“And they gave us like a lot of freedom in VFX to make what I think was a pretty brave choice to go as simple… The great thing about working at Marvel is they’ve got the archives, so if you want to see… I literally received like a PDF of like, ‘Oh and here’s every single frame in order of Marvel canon where Eternity ever spoke.’ When you get stuff like that. you’re like, like Sunday lunch is reading through all this stuff like on the iPad.

That’s got to involve a lot of brainstorming, and a character like Eternity does need a lot of thought and trial to make sure that the aura of mystery does not leave the character when shifted to the bigger screens from the comics

Thor: Love and Thunder is currently available for streaming on Disney+.

Source: Twitter

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Written by Sang Tonsing

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Sang is a content writer for Fandomwire with over 300 published articles. He now has 3 years of experience and counting in content writing. He is currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Political Science at Delhi University.

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