Why Christopher Abbott could be cinema's greatest Wolf Man

Watch: Wolf Man director Leigh Whannell and the cast discuss the horror movie

Of all the actors ever to turn into a werewolf on screen, Christopher Abbott might just be poised to take the crown as the best. Wolf Man director Leigh Whannell declares Abbott’s performance his favourite.

“I really love what Chris did; I don't know that I've seen anyone do with this character what he does in this movie,” the Invisible Man director tells Yahoo. Ozark’s Julia Garner, about to appear as the Silver Surfer in this summer’s Fantastic Four movie and who stars alongside the Poor Things and Girls actor as Abbott’s character’s wife Charlotte in the new Wolf Man reimagining, agrees. Without hesitation.

When you watch Abbott take Blake, emotionally and joltingly, from damaged and troubled son, husband, and father to raging monster — via some revolting body horror — you’ll see just how much the film hinges on his masterful performance. Abbott is humble.

“Well, he should say that, shouldn’t he?” says the actor in response to Whannell’s words. “What's interesting [is] there's been so many iterations of Wolf Man. Whether it's 19th, 18th century, whatever – those versions; the original; American Werewolf in London; the Jack Nicholson Wolf in the ‘90s. They're all different stories. So it's nice because I don't feel like I'm having to repeat anything, because the stories themselves are all wildly different.”

Wolf Man tells the story of Blake (Abbott), who inherits his rural Oregon childhood home after his father is presumed dead. An out-of-work writer, Blake’s successful wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) is battling to keep the family afloat financially while he is a stay-at-home dad to their daughter, Ginger, played by young British talent, Matilda Firth. (Yes, that’s a nod to Ginger Snaps, Whannell confirms – “Look, I've got to have some werewolf references scattered throughout this movie, so why not Ginger?”)

The couple’s marriage fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a family trip to visit the house. But on their approach, they’re attacked by an unseen beast — and it’s from this point that everything unravels. The movie progresses over the course of a night, and we witness the terror as Blake’s family watches him transform into a werewolf. Whannell ratchets up the horror by taking a similar approach to Wolf Man as he did with The Invisible Man — by grounding it in reality.

“If you're writing something, I like to let the film tell me what it wants to be,” says Whannell. “You start to see a picture emerging. The first thing I do when I'm writing a film is I'll have a notebook and I'm just filling it with scraps of ideas, random quotes, pictures I'll cut out. And as that notebook starts to fill up, something starts to emerge.

"And so, with Invisible Man, it was very clear that it was about domestic abuse, and the title of the film says, ‘Okay, so the villain is this man’. So, this issue of women in a toxic relationship was presenting itself. With Wolf Man, it wasn't so much that it was 'Okay, we're seeing this through the woman's eyes' but again, the title is Wolf Man — he's the one who's changing. And I wanted it to be about disease.

"So all of a sudden it became clear that [Charlotte] was the human side of the film, like when you're in a relationship with someone who's suffering from an illness, the person who does not have the illness is the one doing most of the suffering. In terms of emotion. You're the one watching them lose themselves. So it just became clear that she was going to be the lead in that.”

Creating the wolf

Though we certainly feel the suffering of both Charlotte and daughter Ginger in the film, we also experience what Blake is going through. Part of the appeal of telling this story for Whannell was the opportunity to represent the Wolf Man’s point of view.

“It was really this idea about perspective and seeing the Wolf Man transformation from the point of view of the person who's changing, and how you could play with sound and light [that drew me in],” he says. “Once that idea hooked me, I was like, all right, I want to make this movie.”

Never before has a werewolf’s transformation been depicted in quite this way – with a really immersive insight into the transition from the werewolf’s point of view. We experience the fear and the pain and all the complex emotions as Blake switches to something altogether more animalistic. We see from the werewolf’s point of view as he begins to lose the ability to communicate and understand the humans around him.

So how did Abbott prepare for the role? “It's a different kind of research that goes into [a role like this]. There's tons of animal videos on YouTube that you can comb through and pick from,” says the actor.

He continues, “When you're an actor, you're always dealing in the psychology of characters, and the complicated nature of what it is to be human. And then to track it in such a way where you have to, as an actor in this, let go of a lot of the more complicated emotions as things get worse; and as the monster comes out more, the progression takes over, it becomes much more simplified.

"I loved playing with the idea of very straightforward emotions, which is more animal-like, whether it's just fear, anger, [or] hungry, tired, protect, attack. I tried to think in as simple terms as that as it progressed.”

Co-star Julia Garner says that the practical make-up effects they used to sculpt Abbott into the form of a fully-fledged wolf man were actually “very scary,” and helpful for her own performance. Young Firth, however, might have turned it on when it mattered but when the cameras stopped rolling, it was a different story.

“She was kind of like, ‘He looks weird.’ I was like, ‘I know’,” says Garner.

Whannell laughs, “It's funny. Matilda has such a healthy view of it all, because within a scene, she's so true and emotional. But as soon as you call cut, she'll just laugh at Chris and give him the side eye. She loved taking the p**s, as they say in the UK, out of Chris. She would be side-eyeing him, just like, ‘What are you doing?’ … If anything, she made fun of him. I shouldn't be saying that. I don't want to incept the audience with the idea that [she found it hilarious]. No, she was terrified. I'm telling you she was terrified.”

Making a monster

For everyone else in the room, it was another matter. Whannell says that the secretive approach of the film’s make-up designer, Arjen Tuiten, who also worked on Pan’s Labyrinth, Thor, and Maleficent, among other high profile movies, ensured a memorable reaction.

“He's very protective of his work, as he should be,” says the director. “When we did the camera test, [that] was the first time people saw him. It was in a big room with all these lights around and stuff. We were all just waiting in there, and there's a bunch of crew people. We're all hanging around talking; you know, people are on their phones. And then finally the door opened, and everyone just went into this hush.

"I still get chills. All of a sudden it was quiet, and we saw Arjen and the two make-up people carrying all this gear, and we’re like, he's here. And he walked in, and he was not himself. He came in in the make-up, and he definitely stopped the room.”

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Abbott says he didn’t quite beat the reported ten hours in the make-up chair racked up by Lon Chaney Jr in the 1941 version, but he says they did nudge seven and a half hours. “Does that mean I can’t complain about my time?” jokes Abbott. It’s a lot by anybody’s standards – a day’s work before the work proper has even started.

But the actor is typically low-key. “Luckily, it's not like I had to do it every day, because I'm not constantly in prosthetics,” says Abbott. “And there's stages. Some days were only two and a half hours. Depends how much I had to put on.”

Whannell praises the “egoless” actor: “He's not driven by what's going to make him look good in a movie, or what's the right strategic move for his career, or what's the best superhero to be playing right now; he's a real artist first, and he is a true artist, and you can tell by the movies he chooses.”

Abbott might not have been the only actor in the running for the role in the early stages, but as soon as Whannell saw him on stage, he knew he’d found the right man.

“He was doing an off-Broadway play with Aubrey Plaza, and it was just the two of them on stage, and his energy was just electric,” says Whannell. “It wasn't a huge theater, so you felt like you could really feel that energy he was putting out. I remember he [was] playing such an angry character who's just poised on the edge of an explosion. And then I saw him backstage later, and he's just chilling out, having a glass of wine. And I was like, this is the guy.’

New reimaginings

The 1941 Wolf Man shares more than just a little DNA with the new film. One of a number of monster movies in the Universal stable considered classics, many of which have been subject to multiple reimaginings over the decades, Wolf Man is Whannell’s second remake from the series. Surely, then, a trilogy is on the cards? He’d choose to tackle Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde next.

“That's a character, or characters, that I haven't seen, recently, too much of,” says the Saw franchise co-creator. “Obviously, it's this iconic story. It's this great English story. And obviously a lot of these characters were created out of the UK, and the literary tradition from the UK that's created these monsters is just incredible. I just feel like that's a story that maybe hasn't been told recently. That's always a good starting point if you haven't seen 10,000 versions of it.”

So how would he approach it? He explains, “With The Invisible Man, I was like, how do I modernise this? I didn't want to set The Invisible Man in the 1800s. That was the very first thought I had – I don't want to do the fog-bound-streets-of-London version of The Invisible Man. I want to put it in a modern world we recognize. And then the same thing happened with Wolf Man. So I would probably do the same thing.

"What's at the heart of the story of Jekyll and Hyde? It's really about duality. Isn't it about the animal side of us that's within us all? The bad side of us that we push down. That would probably be my way of taking [it on].”

With two pulsating Universal Horror adaptations under his belt, and Whannell making no secret of the fact he’s not exactly gnawing his arm off to go back there again, we’ll have to very patiently lie in wait for that third film.

Wolf Man is in UK cinemas on 17 January.