Warning: This Interview Contains SPOILERS for The Gray Man
With The Gray Man, Joe and Anthony Russo (the directors of Marvel Studios hits like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame) hope to launch a new action movie franchise on Netflix. The Gray Man premieres in theaters on July 15, 2022 before it streams on Netflix starting July 22.
In The Gray Man, Ryan Gosling stars as Sierra Six, a top CIA operative who uncovers a dark conspiracy within the agency. Six is subsequently hunted by another operative, the psychotic Lloyd Hansen played by Chris Evans. A globe-hopping, action-packed thrill ride, The Gray Man also stars Billy Bob Thornton, Ana de Armas, Regé-Jean Page, Jessica Henwick, and Julia Butters.
Screen Rant joined Joe and Anthony Russo at their AGBO office for an in-depth and detailed discussion about The Gray Man, the talents of Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans' turn as a villain, their many movie influences, and whether they have plans to return to Marvel Studios.
Screen Rant: My favorite MCU movie of all time is Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I got so many of the same vibes from The Gray Man.
Joe Russo: They're companion pieces in a lot of ways. They're action-thrillers that deal with very current thematics [like] espionage and deal with characters with very emotionally complex situations. And they're both globe-trotting.
The action in The Gray Man is superb. I legitimately thought you blew up Prague.
Anthony Russo: (laughs) Oh no!
Joe Russo: Uh, we did! I mean, poor Prague. After a month of relentless gunfire and explosions, I think they were ready to see us go.
Anthony Russo: I've gotta say this too: it's hard to thank the pandemic for anything but we did shoot during the depths of the pandemic so Prague was definitely quieter than it normally is.
Joe Russo: It was as empty as it's ever been, right.
Anthony Russo: So that was actually a big boon for us. To be able to move through the city and control parts of the city without it being typical busy, tourist-overrun Prague.
So you went to all of the locations? You went to Vienna, you went to Croatia...
Joe Russo: We did. It was exhausting. We were in France at the Chateau de Chantilly that serves as the end of the movie. For Croatia, that was a plate unit that we sent to Croatia. So we took the Chateau from France and placed it in a moat in Croatia.
Anthony: Portions of our film crew were in all of those places.
Ryan was great. He has a gift for staying so cool even when everything is blowing up around him and he's getting shot full of holes.
Joe Russo: It's a stoic quality and an elegant minimalism to him as an actor. But he can convey a lot with just a look. That's a real gift. There are very few actors in history that can act that way, where you feel a whole internal life on their face with just a few seconds of a look.
So he's perfect for the role in that regard. The Gray Man is a character who is meant to be minimalistic. He's meant to move in and out of shadows. Get in and get out. Execute the mission and leave before he's caught or captured. Ryan was perfect for the role.
It reminded me so much of his performance in Blade Runner 2049, where there was so much going on inside him but he was trying to contain it.
Joe Russo: Yeah, he's struggling against the fates. He's a character who identifies with Sisyphus. But he's also a prisoner and has been for most of his life. He's pulled out of prison by the CIA only to be conscripted by the CIA to work for them for the majority of his adult life. So he's just a character who's looking for freedom.
But what's interesting about the movie as a parable of good and evil is that all of the characters are gray in this film but some lean towards humanity and some lean away from humanity. That's really, ultimately, the thematics behind the movie.
There's also a really great moment where Lloyd calls Ryan's character a "Ken doll." How timely. You've seen the photo of Ryan as Ken in Barbie?
Anthony Russo: Oh yes.
Joe Russo: I believe we reposted that photo.
Anthony Russo: Shockingly, that line pre-dated his involvement in that movie. We tried several alts when we shot [that scene]. We commonly shoot alts. We like to have options in the edit room. So we did have other versions of that beat in the edit room but we did commit to the "Ken doll" line. It just seemed the funniest to us. But by the time we did commit to it in the edit, he was playing Ken.
Joe Russo: We like to think we inspired him. (laughs)
Were you guys chomping at the bit to make Chris Evans a villain during all of those Captain America films?
Anthony Russo: As you can imagine, the ability to work with Chris over those four movies with that character was amazing. Talk about Ryan Gosling being a master of minimalism, Captain America is also a very disciplined, focused character. It required an extremely deft hand for Evans to be able to play that character with all of the charisma that he brought to it.
Working with Chris for all that time, we knew what a great actor he was, we knew what his range could be. We also know how he thinks. He thinks like a filmmaker. He's a very intelligent, savvy actor, and he understands filmmaking on every level. So we were looking for the opportunity to find something that was basically the opposite of Captain America with him. I don't know that we could get more opposite than this character.
How excited was Chris to play a villain, finally?
Anthony Russo: Well, you see what he did! The mustache was his idea. He threw everything at that role on a creative level. He really relished every aspect of it. He's a partner. He's one of those actors who is making the movie with you.
Did you cast Ana de Armas after No Time To Die?
Joe Russo: It was while she was doing it. She had just completed it, I think. Before the film had come out.
Anthony Russo: Right, nobody had seen it yet. We weren't able to see it till long after.
But she was already secret agent trained.
Joe Russo: She was, yeah! Honestly, she went into an intense amount of training for this movie. She trained for weeks. Her and Ryan. Ryan trained for months to be able to accomplish the amount of physical stuff he had.
I feel like you fulfilled Ana's potential from No Time To Die.
Anthony Russo: That was really important to us. We need a vibrant, fun, strong, female character in this movie. We spent a lot of time crafting that character. It was very important to us that that character be a partner and an equal to Six. Not a romantic interest. Ana just embodied that character in such a cool way.
I loved how the villains had a backstory and there was a long history between Jessica Henwick's character, Regé-Jean, and Lloyd. And they all went to Harvard together. What do you have against Harvard? Why are these terrible bad guys from Harvard?
Anthony Russo: (laughs) Where would you put the villains from?
Joe Russo: I read an article [about] some extremist thought that's been coming out of Harvard the last few years. It was interesting as the world is getting more divisive. We try to make our movies as timely and current and topical as we can. We're trying to provoke thought or at least affect you on a subconscious level.
This idea that radical thought - this real extremist thought - is coming out of Harvard was an interesting idea to create this cabal of --
Anthony Russo: Intellectuals.
Joe Russo: Intellectuals who saw the world in a very different way than the mainstream did. And that they had all worked together to infiltrate the CIA and basically be agents of chaos.
It's mentioned that there's a shadow government, even deeper layers that you haven't really touched on in this film.
Anthony Russo: That's right. We're exploring this idea [where] America's a democracy but we exist in a world that's not a democracy. There's a school of thought embodied by this cabal in the movie that you can't play by democratic rules and survive in a world that's not democratic. So you have to operate in another manner. That's the intellectual heart of this group that they're a part of.
Whereas the other side of the equation, the people represented by Fitzroy [Billy Bob Thornton] in the movie, are more into the idea that you have to be accountable for your actions. To a higher authority. Ultimately, you have to answer to the American people. It's an interesting conflict at the heart of a democracy about how you conduct yourself.
Jessica Henwick's character has a line in Prague when everything's going to hell where she says, "We're all going to prison!" Yeah, you should. This is terrible.
Anthony Russo: (laughs) That's the thing. Even a bad guy can be aware that there's a limit. Some bad guys, like Lloyd, aren't aware that there's a limit.
Joe Russo: There's varying levels of insanity.
Julia Butters was great. I loved her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Joe Russo: She's great. She's a really mature actress and she brings that to her characters. We thought it'd be really interesting if Six was paired with a precocious young girl who can call him on his bulls--- and poke holes in his servitude to the CIA. We couldn't think of anyone better for that.
I feel like Claire will be in therapy for the rest of her life.
Anthony Russo: Oh, poor Claire!
Joe Russo: Very likely, yes. Very likely.
Or you can do the opposite route and she's like Natalie Portman in The Professional.
Joe Russo: That's right. She becomes...
Anthony Russo: She's the new Gray Man.
I loved the airplane sequence. The way the plane went down and the skydiving sequence that followed it, which reminded me of the opening scene of Moonraker.
Joe Russo: We're pop culture maniacs. When we were kids we absorbed everything in every movie and every TV show and every comic book and every Dungeons and Dragons manual and every Atari game. Just go down the list. We've drawn inspiration from all of that for our work.
I also liked Ryan’s running joke of “We don’t throw a loaded gun.” Is that a real thing? Where did that come from?
Joe Russo: It is a safety rule, obviously. You never throw a loaded gun. But it was Ryan's idea.
Anthony Russo: It came out of an organic process, yeah.
Joe Russo: It was Ryan's pitch for the joke. A lot of the quirky sense of humor in the movie was encouraged by Ryan. Anthony and I, having worked in Arrested Development and Community, have a quirky sense of humor. Ryan was a great collaborator in that regard. He loves dry, offbeat humor and he pushed to bring a lot of that to the character.
The Gray Man feels like the first of many. Or at least another movie is coming.
Anthony Russo: We certainly think like that. We formed [our] company, AGBO, with our partners Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely who wrote all of our Marvel movies, so we love thinking about narrative universes. It's in our DNA now from our work at Marvel.
So most things we do here we think about as a narrative universe. Certainly, that's how we approach The Gray Man. We have many iterations of this narrative in our minds and it can have a variety of expressions, either in films or series.
Also, Joe, very nice cameo at the end in the CIA.
Joe: Russo: Well, it wasn't me, it was my twin brother. (laughs) I do that for my kids, mostly. They're entertained by these cameos.
Will we see The Old Man in the next one?
Joe Russo: Yes, if we're fortunate enough that the audience embraces this movie and we're fortunate enough to make more of them. The movie's really about a corrupt and toxic patriarchy. The Old Man is representative of that. He's the ethereal character who floats around in the background and clearly has a lot of power and control but is very nefarious.
Ryan's character is reacting against a corrupt patriarchy. The whole film is [about] fathers and abusers. His old man is an abuser. The CIA has abused him. We thought it'd be interesting to have this character that we never meet but gets referred to who represents that patriarchy.
In terms of Marvel, do you guys have any plans or ambitions to return to the MCU in any form?
Anthony Russo: We love Marvel. Our time there was among the best time of our filmmaking career. We love everybody there and collaborated so well with them. But we don't have anything planned. Not to say that something might not feel right in the future for all of us.
We've got our hands full right now on what we're doing here. We go into production on a new movie later this year that was also written by Markus and McFeely called The Electric State. We're sort of in that zone.
The Gray Man Synopsis
When the CIA's top asset -- his identity known to no one -- uncovers agency secrets, he triggers a global hunt by assassins set loose by his ex-colleague.
Check back soon for our interview with The Gray Man stars Regé-Jean Page and Jessica Henwick, and catch our previous interviews with Joe & Anthony Russo for Cherry and Mosul.
