Tim Roth talks returning to Marvel as Abomination for She-Hulk : 'I love my career being chaos'

Sydney Bucksbaum
·6 min read
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Tim Roth talks returning to Marvel as Abomination for She-Hulk : 'I love my career being chaos'
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Warning: This article contains spoilers about episode 3 of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.

Tim Roth is the first to admit that he never thought he'd return to Marvel after 2008's The Incredible Hulk.

One of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's first films starred Edward Norton as Bruce Banner a.k.a. the Hulk (before Mark Ruffalo took over the role) and Roth as the government agent-turned-supervillain Emil Blonsky, a.k.a. Abomination. A decade and a half later, Roth is back in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, as Emil finally gets a parole hearing for the destruction he caused while fighting the Hulk in that early movie. Thanks to Bruce's own cousin Jen Walters a.k.a. She-Hulk (Tatiana Maslany) and a game-changing testimony by Sorcerer Supreme Wong (Benedict Wong), by the end of episode 3, Emil is now a free man.

It's a redemption arc Roth never imagined the character would get, simply because he thought his Marvel days were long over. "Originally I did the film that we did all those years ago for my children," Roth tells EW. "I just thought it would make them laugh that Dad's a monster — that kind of monster — and also slightly embarrass them, which is always good. And it did, so it succeeded on both levels. And so years pass and then they asked me if I would come in to do some voice work on Shang-Chi."

Abomination appeared in a seemingly throwaway cameo in 2021's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, fighting Wong in an underground cage match. After Wong won, the two amicably shook hands before Wong sent Abomination back to his cell through a portal. Episode 3 of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law finally explained the reason behind that battle: Wong took Emil from his cell because he just needed a worthy opponent to fight during his training to become Sorcerer Supreme. But Roth admits that he doesn't "really know anything about it."

She-Hulk
She-Hulk

Marvel Studios Tim Roth has returned to Marvel as Abomination for 'She-Hulk: Attorney at Law'

"I haven't seen it, I didn't know anything about it at all," he says. "I generally don't watch the things that I'm in. I spent just a few minutes in the middle of COVID with them in a sound studio. It was fun."

But that recording session led to Roth getting yet another call from Marvel. "They said, 'Would you come in and have a chat with us? We've got an idea.' I was like, '... Okay,'" Roth remembers. "I went in and there's Kevin [Feige] who I hadn't seen in years ... he told me what they had in mind. It appealed to the sort of anarchy in me, I suppose, in the sense of I love my career being chaos. It really appealed on that level."

Roth was given a stack of She-Hulk comic books to learn more about the character, and was told the general storyline of the series and what they had planned for Emil. And since head writer Jessica Gao previously worked on Rick and Morty, Roth knew he couldn't say no. "And so here we are," he says. "I felt that it was just a lovely way to revisit my children's childhood. I loved the notion of that." He laughs before adding, "But then you've got to do it. It was really difficult at first. I honestly didn't know what I was doing."

Returning to the character after so many years had passed is one thing — playing Emil in a half-hour comedy after previously playing him in an intense action drama is a whole other challenge. It wasn't until he watched Maslany and Ruffalo filming together that Roth finally started to feel comfortable in his role.

"I was a couple of days in and they were deep into shooting and I had to do a scene with Mark Ruffalo and Tatiana, and I turn up early, because I'm always early, and I watched them doing stuff together," he says. "I watched them on-camera and it was absolutely hilarious and really good. But then I watched them relating off-camera, and that was when the penny dropped for me. 'Oh, I get it. Okay, now I know.' How they were off-camera and then the bridge that took them into shooting, they showed me how to function in that world. And then I had so much fun."

Getting to go off-script was a true highlight for him, because it allowed him to explore more layers of his character than he ever thought possible. "They let me improvise and play and fool around and dance on the edge of, 'Is he [good], though?' That kind of thing," Roth says. "That was always the question: 'Is he telling the truth here? And where are we going?'"

Roth won't elaborate more on whether or not Emil's being truthful when he says he's a reformed man. "That's the fun. I can't answer that for you," he says with a laugh. "He's been kept in maximum security solitary confinement for a very long time. What does that do to someone? Where does that lead him? And who is this guy now? Should we have a leap of faith in him or not?"

He laughs again before adding, "That's for you to find out. The mischief is just all the way in there, and there's more to come. You'll see. I know what's coming. I hope we get away with it, I can only say that."

And while Roth isn't sure if this made the final cut of episodes, he does tease that during filming, he got to acknowledge the fact that the last time he played Emil was with Norton, and now Bruce Banner looks extremely different as Ruffalo.

"It was great. I don't know if it's in there [in the episode], but there is a slight bit of confusion when I see him," Roth says. "We riffed on that a lot when we were shooting but I don't know if any of it made it in. 'You really put on weight,' that kind of stuff. It's very funny. But listen, I got to work with two great actors, that's the bottom line. Ed's fantastic, and Mark Ruffalo, I've always wanted to work with Mark Ruffalo, and I got to do it. That's pretty much a bonus. I'll take that."

New episodes of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law debut Thursdays on Disney+.

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