Playing the Villain: A Guardians of the Galaxy Star on Creative Process, Childhood Dreams, and More: An Interview with Chukwudi Iwuji

AUSTIN RATNER: [You've come] to Hollywood in the footsteps of Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen. I wanted to ask you when your knighthood is coming.

CHUKWUDI IWUJI: You know, I think I need to rebuild my relationship with Prince [King] Charles. I actually have met him on a couple of occasions at the Royal Shakespeare Company. So I need to go through the back channel. Say “Hey, Charlie, hook me up, you know.”

AR: Just drop my name, I'm interested in a knighthood as well. One of the things that I wanted to ask you was whether your background in Shakespearean theater helped you conceive of the High Evolutionary, because he is actually kind of a tragic hero.

CI: From the first moment in the movie the sort of determined single-mindedness of the character was part of the psychology. The fact that he loves space opera was part of the psychology. The fact that he's referred to as “Sire,” it gives [an idea of his] God complex. His overall thing—to create a perfect world, which is a completely subjective idea and deeply flawed—is very Shakespearian in the sense of tragic heroes usually are these great people who have a flaw. His is the egotistical narcissism of believing he knew what perfect was.

AR: Freud wrote a paper on character types met with in psychoanalysis. One of the character types that he lays out in this paper is what he calls “criminal from a sense of guilt,” and his idea is that criminality is in some cases a manifestation of an internal conflict where people are essentially rebelling against their overly harsh conscience. I felt this was relevant to the figure of the High Evolutionary. There's a great line in the movie where he says, “I'm not trying to conquer the world, I'm perfecting it.” That was a moment where I felt like, “Oh, I understand this guy, he has this conscience-driven need to make things better to satisfy some internal ideal — an ideal of himself and of the world and of people.” It leads him to do actually horrible, horrific things.

CI: You might have just tapped on how to play villains, actually. There's the thing they say in acting: “When you're playing a villain, you never think of yourself as a villain.” I think that's just “conscience-driven criminality,” it's just brilliant. He doesn't see himself as doing anything wrong, but his drive to perfect the world is criminal in how he does it—and that's an interesting villain. “Conscience-driven criminality.” I'm gonna drop that in a lot of conversations going forward because he is ultimately a criminal because of that need.

Ultimately this guy is damaged on the inside, right? Anyone that (a) has that as a goal, (b) seeks it without seeing that they're doing anything wrong, is damaged inside. There's a hell of a lot of pain inside this guy, and I think it's depicted physically with what Rocket does to his face. But even before that, there's a suggestion that what his face then becomes already existed inside him. What if it started with him, doing it to himself, trying to perfect himself. That would be the conscience-driven criminality. They perform the criminal act because of something ruptured inside them. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. I never codified it in terms of that, but that is essentially what it is: “I'm just trying to make things better,” which comes from a damage inside him.

AR: Guardians 3 director James Gunn has called you one of the best actors he's ever worked with. Is it empowering to work for a director who has that kind of belief in you?

CI: First of all, it's empowering to be hired, period. James Gunn is one of the most powerful directors on the planet. So the fact that he literally said he could have had anyone and chose me was, I'd have to say career-wise, given the scale of it, the single most empowering hiring that I've experienced. The fact that I was working with him for the second time really meant that when I turned up on this set with all these hundreds of people, with the world literally watching us do this, I didn't feel that pressure of “Oh, will I disappoint him?”—no, I did. I still felt I might maybe screw it up or let him down, which is an actor's impostor syndrome that I don't think will ever go [away], and maybe it's a useful thing to have. I'm sure Freud had something to say about that.

[Working with James] was that wonderful combination of knowing you're in safe hands, that the minimum you're gonna do is what was in his head, which is gonna be great. Or the minimum I was gonna bring was what he hoped I would bring to the character. And then after you've done that, you both know you've got it in the bag and you say, “What can we do if we just let go of our expectations?” and then some magic would come out of it. You know, there was a scene where I asked Rocket, “How the hell did you know this all happened?” It's probably my favorite scene [that I was in]. Between [James] writing it and us shooting it, I had sent him all this classical music that I really love. Because I was just imagining, “this guy listens to space opera.” One of the things I sent was Purcell's “Dido's Lament,” which then plays in that [scene]. John Murphy recorded it live with a choir, I think in Abbey Road. And James plays his music live on set. He actually played it and that music came on. And then we started doing the scene, and this was one of those scenes we didn't quite know how it was [going to go] and the music informed it.

There was this pathos, there was this Shakespearean operatic drama to it that can only come with me feeling the music, the sense of grandness of it. And then we got the scene. When you have that type of music playing, you fit the action to the word, the word to the action, right? As Hamlet said. And then we got something different. And I love that about James. As prepared as he is, as much as you know you're in safe hands, there's always room to say, “What else can we create here?”

AR: When you talk about space opera and the music, I immediately think of Star Wars, because it's the original Hollywood space opera, at least for people our age, and the music plays a huge role in it. For someone like you or me, who grew up on Star Wars—and it was literally an early inspiration for you as a kid, according to [an] interview that I read in Variety—what does it feel like to inhabit a dream like that?

CI: I have a therapist, we talk about childhood a lot. It's still hard for me to put together that kid that watched those movies with me now. I can almost put together that kid with me in my everyday life, but the kid that has become the actor, in Guardians, I can't. It's too big a leap. When you ask me that question, I get emotional because it's almost like I'm re-realizing that I've done that. When you put it like that I go, “Oh shit, I've now done that and someone is watching Guardians 3 like I watched Return of the Jedi or Empire Strikes Back.” [It's] impossible for me to put that kid together with the High Evolutionary. I process it for a while and then let it go because it's almost too big to accept. It's almost like it's happening to someone else, you know? It's weird. Sometimes in life, we tick so many of the boxes we dreamt about without knowing we've done it, or we've ticked them and we're already thinking of the next one we need to tick off. I need to think of it in those terms, that I really did do that, instead of being caught up in all the stuff that's attached to it, like box office and Marvel in general. I did that, I played that character: my Darth Vader.