As anyone who has watched the recently-released opening minutes of Sony‘s upcoming Kraven the Hunter will know, the new movie is leaning hard into R-rated action. But star Aaron Taylor-Johnson and director J.C. Chandor say the film also has a strong relationship at its heart: the messy dynamic between Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Sergei Kravinoff, his brother Dmitri, and their gangster father Nikolai, as played by the mighty Russell Crowe.
“I think at the core of the story, there’s a real family drama,” Aaron Taylor-Johnson told GamesRadar+ in an exclusive interview. “You see these two boys being brought up in a very toxic environment. Their father is this Russian gangster, the head of this mobster gang, and eventually he wants to hand the business over.”
Sergei, however, doesn’t want anything to do with his Dad’s brutal line of work. “That kind of sends my character down this journey of becoming a vigilante, and his path to being a villain.”
Complicating matters is Dmitri, played by Fred Hechinger. “He is the only thing he [Sergei/Kraven] cares about and wants to protect with all his life, but I think ends up getting caught up in everything [that] might put him in harm’s way, and he has to live with that. And so there is a real strong heart and soul to this story.”
J.C. Chandor, meanwhile, said that the film’s R-rating allowed the film to explore some deeper, darker territory with regards to Kraven and Dmitri’s troubled upbringing. “It sounds weird to say it, but the R-rating allowed us to do some things… There’s a history of mental illness. You’re gonna see a couple things that happen here, where you’re like, ‘whoa’ that actually refers more to the way these kids were brought up.”
Kraven the Hunter, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, and Alessandro Nivola, arrives in cinemas on December 13, 2024. For more upcoming comic book films, check out all the new superhero movies flying your way very soon.