Christopher Eccleston was my first Doctor. In the “Doctor Who” sense, not like he was my pediatrician or anything. I tried to ask him one question about his experience on the show, but he said he was trying to “get away from that” and focus on Thor: The Dark World, which I respect entirely. I moved on. I can’t help but feel like it’s too bad though; as The Doctor he brought a lot of joy into my life, and his speech about how the one possibility mankind never considered was that we might not destroy ourselves, that we might actually make it, was exactly what I needed to hear at a certain point in my life, performed in exactly the right way to affect me.
My point is, Mr. Eccleston, if you ever read this: thank you. Whether or not that ever happens, I hope the rest of you enjoy my interview with one of the stars of Thor: The Dark World, covering the creation of the villain Malekith, the formulation of the Dark Elves’ language, his fandom for Star Trek, his unexpected Anthony Hopkins connection, and why he’d love to return to the G.I. Joe movie franchise as Destro.
CraveOnline: I was wondering if you could talk to me about Malekith, because we don’t really get to go into a lot of depth with Malekith. We don’t get to see him at home with his family or anything like that.
Christopher Eccleston: [Laughs] I like the idea though. Malekith at home with his family.
He has to take a day off once in a while, right?
Yeah, yeah.
What were the conversations about Malekith and where he was coming from?
Well, the first conversation with Alan [Taylor] was about how he wanted to avoid “the cackling fiend.” Alan spoke to me a lot about the Dark Elves’ sense of their own gravitas and aristocracy, and their ancientness. He wanted them to have a sense of entitlement and bearing. He wanted them regal, you know, that they felt that they were the superior beings of the Nine Realms. And of course, as in any film, the script that we shot is not the script that people see. There were various scenes in there, which for whatever reason didn’t make the final cut, which shaded in Malekith’s background. So even though the audience don’t hear about it, I’m hoping that it’s still present in the performance.
His full title, as far as I know, in Norse mythology and in Marvel mythology, is Malekith the Accursed. Which suggests that something tragic has happened to him. So Alan spoke to me about wanting him to have a tragic quality. Whether that’s [effective] or not is up to the audience to decide, but that was the idea. We just didn’t want to be snarling all the time, certainly with that amount of very strong prosthetics, that would be a mistake too.
These scenes that didn’t make it into the film, I hope we see them on the DVD at some point. It sounds like it wasn’t more action, it sounds like it was character-building.
There was a scene where Malekith was in a certain area of Svartalfheim and remembering his children, his wife and children bathing there, and they had been lost to him. And some of the actions of Odin’s father, Bor, also. There was an extended scene with Anthony Hopkins where they discussed what had caused this ancient grievance between The Dark Elves and themselves. That kind of material. More character-related, yeah.
I’m actually kind of disappointed that didn’t make the cut. That sounds like it would have given you more of a connection to Odin.
Yeah, yeah. I would think it’s probably for complex reasons to do with Odin and Frigga’s relationship, I think. And the implications of possibly making Odin more brutal.
Did they invent a whole new language for the Elves, or did they just give you phonetic lines of dialogue?
No, it’s a brand new language. Alan had worked with a gentleman, I’m afraid I don’t know his name, [but] the gentleman who created it worked for Alan on “Games of Thrones.” He created a language for the Dark Elves which was specifically for the Dark Elves. As I understood it there were a number of influences, but one of the primary influences was Finnish. So one of the things I did was I went online and YouTube and watched people – or rather, listened to people – speaking in Finnish to get some idea of the rhythms of the language.
That’s what I was wondering: if it’s a fictional language, would that give you a lot of freedom with inflection? Would you need to base it on a pattern of some kind?
Well, the pattern to a certain extent sort of suggests itself, according to the way the man who has created the language has asked you to stress, you know, where the stress the on each particular word falls. But within that you can play with the music of it, and we didn’t want the music to be overly familiar. You know, if the Elves had sounded vaguely Italian, that would suggest that wouldn’t be great. So perhaps Eastern European or Northern European was [the right] music. So there’s room for play, really, and actually, hopefully we jumped between a few different musics. That was the beauty of it. It was pretty hair-raising doing it, but I was very pleased with the results. I think it does give the sense of an entirely different, ancient race. That was very important for the Dark Elves, was that they have a similar gravitas to Odin and Thor. They belong to the Nine Realms just as much as Odin and Thor do. They have gravitas and history.
It’s that history that’s one of the things I love about this franchise. I grew up very obsessed with Norse mythology.
Right.
Even though it has this sci-fi angle to it, it really treats the significance of the characters with a lot of respect.
Yeah. I like that too. It’s interesting to think that Malekith for instance is a product of the Norse mythology, and he’s gone through the Marvel mythology, and there’s probably three Malekiths. There’s the one that belongs squarely to Norse mythology, and there’s the one that belongs square to Marvel mythology, and then there’s the one in the middle which is a synthesis of the two. Yeah, it gives it some mystery I think.
