In Legion, Paul Bettany is a badass angel shorn of his wings and battling it out with, well, legions of other angels sent by God to exterminate the human race.
In Creation he takes a more cerebral turn, playing one of his own personal heros, Charles Darwin, who is struggling with the consequences of his discoveries about the origin of species. The conflict is made more intensely personal here because of how the scientist's findings clash with the faith of his deeply religious wife, played by Jennifer Connelly, who (just to make things even weirder) is also Bettany's actual wife.
His performance as Darwin won some rave reviews when it debuted last year in Britain, with the Guardian calling it his "career-best performance." In Legion, by contrast, there is a lot less talk and a whole lot more action. Changing pace like that was really no problem for him, though, he tells the Orlando Sentinel:
I do a movie like Legion because I want to see an audience's popcorn jump up in the air! I loved seeing those movies growing up. Dawn of the Dead sticks with me. What a thrill, this siege with just a handful of people, trapped in a shopping mall, battling an onslaught of zombies. Legion is just like that, without zombies. The CGI [computer-generated imagery] guys put wings on me, and once you've got wings, the rest is easy!
Besides, he says, reconciling such different roles provides a crazy kind of balance:
When I’m making a movie as Charles Darwin, I’m sitting in my trailer, hankering to run around shooting vampires. And when I’m battling vampires (as in Priest, which opens this fall) I think, "It would be awfully nice to be in something nice and quiet with a lot of talking in it."
Posted 01.18.10 by reelz