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Cowboy bebop spike12/11/2023 ![]() I noticed your costume did not include a big bird on your shoulder. And the other part was this gunslinger, all in black, like someone who rides into town. The bottom half of me was almost like a skinhead - someone who could kick your head in. My version had these tight trousers and boots. In the anime, I think he’s almost like this ’90s Patrick Bateman style: big, long overcoats. It didn’t look intimidating because it was not made for a real body in the real world with real materials. The first costume I tried on was a replica of the anime costume, and it just didn’t look like a human being would wear it. ![]() ![]() That was always it: Let’s start with the anime, look at what that’s like, and whether it suits us as human beings. But it’s also a look that was not designed for a real human being to wear. What about the costume? Again, you’re talking about a character design fans know and love and have pored over in incredible detail. You’re like, “Should we go a little lower?” They always start with long wigs, and you slowly chop them up. And also: Why wouldn’t you do it? It’s such a cool, iconic kind of look. There was a very brief discussion about whether we should have the wig, but it was decided very quickly: We have to have the wig. How did his live-action look come together? So much of his impact in the anime is aesthetic: The katana, the black coat, the long white hair … This is what my father would have wanted. There’s a logic to him: Someone this rich and successful should look like this and dress like this. I think he probably thinks he needs to look a certain way, act a certain way. But he’s actually this fucked-up thug who’s very unhinged and much more unstable. He desperately wants to be seen by the world as that Vicious and to see himself as that Vicious. I think he wants to be the Vicious from the anime. How do you compare your version of the character to the original? One of the major things that separates the live-action Cowboy Bebop from the original anime is that we spend much, much more time with Vicious. He was a normal boy and then through the initiation of getting into the Syndicate, he got that name as part of, like, a gang rite. I don’t want to give anything away in case they use it at a later point, but in my imagination, he had a name. I’m hoping you can clear something up for me: Is Vicious’s name really “Vicious”? Or is that just a very fitting nickname? Here, Hassell takes us inside Cowboy Bebop’s most violent villain and tries to find a little sympathy for the devil. (For the record, it’s a Venusian absinthe.) No detail was too small he even imagined the type of liquor Vicious might be drinking. “To me, the new material had a new space it could live in: a sort of gothic, almost Greek tragedy.”Īs this new take on Vicious came together, Hassell went through extensive fight training and concocted his own exhaustive biography to explore how the character might’ve turned out so, well, vicious. “The great thing about Cowboy Bebop is that it straddles so many genres,” says Hassell. To accommodate this new arc, a number of harrowing scenes were added between Vicious and his wife, Julia, boosting the flavor of Cowboy Bebop’s already-overflowing stew of influences and tones. By contrast, Hassell’s Vicious is in all ten episodes of the Netflix series with a new, beefy subplot chronicling the bloody scheme by which he eventually takes control of the Syndicate. He’s right: There are 26 episodes of the original anime, and Vicious appears in five of them, though he makes such an impression that his menace looms over the series anyway. “The thing about the original anime is that Vicious isn’t in it a great deal,” he says. As he prepared to play the live-action version of Cowboy Bebop’s Vicious - the sinister villain who bedevils protagonist Spike Spiegel throughout the beloved anime series - Alex Hassell soon realized the unique task in front of him.
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