Zachary Levi on how 'Shazam!' trailer answers skeptics — and why he needed an assistant to pee while wearing the costume
The upcoming DCEU comedy (you heard that right) Shazam! proved to be one of the biggest surprises of San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday, when its hilarious trailer premiered to cheers in Hall H and subsequent raves on the internet.
It was a relief for star Zachary Levi, who’d heard plenty of the skepticism from anxious fans as the film gets closer to its 2019 release.
“I quite like social media, I’ve been using it for quite some time and fostering relationships with fans and all that jazz,” says Levi (Chuck), who was joined by co-stars Asher Angel and Jack Dylan Grazer and director David F. Sandberg. “But there’s a really horrible side to social media, which is all the negativity. And there are a lot of people that are very passionate about the comic world, and I love their passion, but sometimes their fear can lead to a lot of anger. And this is a beloved character through many different decades and different iterations of the character, and so it’s understandable that people were like, ‘What’s this gonna be? What’s this version of this gonna be?'”
Prior to Comic-Con, only one official image from the film had been released, showing Billy Batson as his grown-up alter-ego Shazam chugging cans of soda with his best friend Freddy Freeman (Grazer).
“You can only tell so much by a still image, and they’ve been very decisive about it,” Levi says of fans. “A full live trailer [shows] you this is how this thing feels, and that’s great to finally get that to the people and say, ‘This is what it feels like.’ Now they have something tangible.”
The trailer (watch below) is littered with laughs, including one moment where Shazam bemoans the fact that he hasn’t yet figured out how to relieve himself while in costume. That, it turns out, was art imitating life.
“It’s kind of a pain in the ass to go to the restroom [in it],” Levi reveals. “It requires an assistant, I’m not lying. I would have to sit down and spread my legs and they would have to unzip me.
“If I needed to drop a deuce I had to take the whole thing off.”
Shazam! opens April 5, 2019. Watch the trailer:
Read more on Yahoo Entertainment:
