Liev Schreiber – “Comic book movies are as close to Shakespeare as you can get in the movie business”
He may be an acclaimed, classically trained actor of stage and screen, but he believes that “people underestimate the level of teenage boy in me” when they act puzzled about why he took the role of the villainous Sabretooth in this summer’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Speaking to MTV, Liev Schreiber explained “When everyone said they were shocked that I wanted to be a mutant in the new X-Men movie, I was not surprised at all, and would do it over and over again. The only hard part is all the exercise.”
Schreiber acted opposite X-Men’s Patrick Stewart in a New York production of The Tempest, and has also performed on-stage in Cymbeline, Hamlet, and Macbeth, and appeared in the 2000 film version of Hamlet. He went on to say that comic book movies are “as close to Shakespeare as you can get in the movie business. … The size of characters, the size of the emotion, the fantasy element – all of that stuff is… bigger than life.”
Schreiber can currently be seen acting opposite 007’s Daniel Craig in Holocaust pic “Defiance”. “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” hits Irish cinemas this summer.