Fans everywhere have been wondering: How can anybody replace Patrick Warburton as Ben Edlund’s loopy big blue superhero? Now, we get a glimpse of what the guy inside the freaky new Tick suit can do.
Entertainment Weekly has two exclusive clips of Amazon’s revival of The Tick, the latter of which features Peter Serafinowicz as the Tick chatting up Arthur, played by Griffin Newman.
Serafinowicz brings blustery, unhinged bravado to his portrayal, as discussed when I interviewed Edlund at Comic-Con last month:
Let’s talk about casting. I’ll never forget when I heard Patrick Warburton was going to be The Tick in the last version. I was like, “Oh my God. It’s utterly perfect.” I think there’s a lot of affection for what he did in the short time he was able to do it. When they were talking about mounting it back up, the idea was that he was going to return. But Serafinowicz is a dyed-in-the-wool nerd. He loves his comic books and video games. There’s different physicality. There’s different quirks and nuances. How did the differences in casting affect your approach to the character?
Edlund: It’s everything. It is the new expression of The Tick… Ultimately, what we came to find as we were doing this, it had to be a brand new expression. Everything was different. The way Arthur functions, the way The Tick functions, the way the world functions, the way we envision it, the way the humour functions. It’s different, in terms of less puns. The things that work in a cartoon or in a heightened universe, you cannot use in the same way. The puns have to be different. Sometimes they have to be structural, which means it’s rhyming action versus things that are more subtle but are built in. Here’s the thing about the prior live-action, which I think as a piece, works. As much as we would have done other things with it, it did not need much more of itself to get what it needed to get it across.