“Kraven the Hunter is a big action movie, but at its core it’s also a good old-fashioned Russian gangster story, a story about the making of one of the greatest villains there is,” says director J.C. Chandor. “Like many gangster stories, this film is a family tragedy. There are a lot of things here that people will recognize in their own families, which is the complexity of your relationships with your parents, with your siblings, with your half-siblings.”
“Like any good villain story, there’s a price to pay when you try and take a shortcut to doing the right thing, or you try and step outside of who you really are, says Chandor.
Kraven The Hunter is the action-packed, R-rated, standalone story of how one of Marvel’s most iconic villains came to be. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Kraven, a man whose complex relationship with his ruthless gangster father, Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe), starts him down a path of vengeance with brutal consequences, motivating him to become not only the greatest hunter in the world, but also one of its most feared.
As Kraven—born Sergei Kravinoff—embarks on a bloody journey of revenge and vigilantism, he gradually becomes a villain. “Kraven believes that he can make the world a better place through breaking basic tenets of society and fundamental rules of decency,” Chandor continues. “But he believes he’s doing that to serve the greater good. He absolutely does.”
Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who plays Kraven, says that the tragedy of Kraven’s story is that he did not have to be a villain. He has been molded by his father, Nikolai, played by Russell Crowe, to have the inner strength to take over the family business—and to be as unforgiving and violent as his father is. For Taylor-Johnson, the root of Kraven the Hunter is in Sergei’s decision to break free of his family’s legacy of crime and cruelty – but instead of making him a savior, that decision ultimately turns him into an even more terrifying kind of criminal.
At the heart of it, Taylor-Johnson explains, is his relationship with his brother, played by Fred Hechinger. “Sergei’s younger brother, Dmitri, has been shunned from the beginning as the inferior sibling,” explains Taylor-Johnson. “Dmitri has been living under his father’s disapproval and abuse, and Kraven decides he’s had enough. He can’t tolerate his father’s corruption anymore—he’s going to go on his own path and make things right. Kraven promises his brother that he’s going to protect him.”
“Ultimately, that promise is his biggest downfall,” Taylor-Johnson continues. “Because even though he says he’s going to be there, his actions show otherwise. By abandoning and neglecting Dmitri, he loses the trust of his brother, and mirrors everything he hates about his father.”
Directed J.C. Chandor, previously the helmer of such films as A Most Violent Year, All Is Lost, and Margin Call, the screenplay is by Richard Wenk and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway, with a story by Richard Wenk, based on the Marvel comics.
To tell Kraven’s story in a compelling, believable way, Chandor felt it important to make it visceral and raw
“One of the amazing opportunities about the film becoming an R-rated film was actually digging into Kraven’s origin,” he says. That was important, Chandor says, because it was the only way to tell the story of Kraven’s journey honestly. “You see this tragic moment when Sergei, this kid filled with testosterone and rage, kills these two guys as a teenager. He’s given a choice—he could have walked away from that incident, and probably never had anyone know that it had happened. But in that moment, there’s some element of bloodlust that he loves. There’s a justification for it: ‘These were bad guys, and I just took them off the planet, and that feels good.’ It’s that uncontrolled rage that is at the heart of this story, but you really would not have been able to walk anywhere near any of those topics in a PG-13 film.”
For Taylor-Johnson, the volatile mix of tactical skill and violent rage exhibited in the film grounds Kraven and sets him apart. “This is like no other Marvel superhero movie, because Kraven isn’t a superhero,” Taylor-Johnson says. “He’s not an alien. He’s not a monster. He’s a man who has been trained as a skilled hunter and killer.” And as the film continues, Kraven will make big decisions about how to use those skills.
To tell the story of a street-level villain, Chandor and his team relied on practical filming locations instead of more VFX-heavy environments. “We shot a lot of this film in England,” Chandor says. “The sun is out, the hills are rolling. Everything you see in this film is the real deal.”
“It grounds the film,” says producer Avi Arad. “All of the action, all of the violence, hits different because it’s the real world.”
Taylor-Johnson found that the practical locations enabled him to embrace Kraven’s character more deeply. “The best action sequence you’re going to see is Kraven running barefoot through the streets of London,” he says. “He doesn’t care about the broken glass piercing his feet. He’s an animal. He’s a raw beast.”
“In this scene, Kraven is running along the River Thames, desperately chasing a bunch of guys who have kidnapped his brother,” explains producer Matt Tolmach. “He’s literally running after, climbing on, trying to tear apart a van that’s making its way across the city with his brother in it. They’re heading towards a helicopter, and Kraven is doing everything he can to stop them before they take off.”
Filling out that real-world landscape is a cast of morally complicated characters. Russell Crowe plays Nikolai, the man at the root of Kraven’s path to villainy. “Nikolai is a very wealthy man, and his kids have grown up with great privilege,” Crowe says. “He’s also a very harsh judge, and he puts his kids under a lot of pressure because he expects them to succeed and excel. As they get a little older, it’s not necessarily a very comfortable place to be when your father is extremely successful and demanding, and has a penchant for violence.”
Crowe, who played Zeus in Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder, enjoyed the chance to explore the darker side of the Marvel universe. “This film has quite a dark tone,” he says. “It probably visits areas of relationships and emotions that some of these other comic book heroes don’t because of that darkness.”
Along with his training, Kraven gets an assist from a character fans of the comics will immediately recognize: Calypso, played by Ariana DeBose. She becomes one of the few people Kraven trusts. “The relationship between Kraven and Calypso is meant to feel like lightning in a bottle,” says DeBose. “It’s sort of this cosmic, astrological, spiritual meeting of two beings who are just destined to be in each other’s lives.”
“Calypso is the rock and the anchor of Kraven’s world,” says Taylor-Johnson. “These two characters have a deep connection to one another. She’s spiritual; she has a sort of intuition and an instinct that guides her. And she is just a badass in her own right.”
As she aids Kraven, Calypso is bolstered by her own family history. “Calypso is exploring who she is, and a part of that is digging into her ancestry,” says DeBose. “I’ve talked a lot in my career about using your lineage and your heritage. It’s a point of pride, it’s a point of strength, it’s what makes you unique.”
Another comic book character making the jump to the big screen is Aleksei Sytsevich, who becomes the Rhino. Alessandro Nivola, who plays Aleksei, sees the character as fundamentally flawed—driven by his insecurities, he’s ruined by his own hubris. “J.C. really liked the idea of this character as somebody who has some kind of deficiency and is trying to supplement that through science,” Nivola says. “And it ends up causing him more suffering than he had before. There’s the feeling of that person being trapped by his own physicality and not being able to escape that I think is very true to the essence of the character.”
Finally, Christopher Abbott plays the mysterious assassin known as the Foreigner. “The Foreigner is one of those guys that has nine passports,” Abbott says. “He has fun playing with other people, and in a way, he’s gotten lost in his own multitude of personalities. He assumes a lot of identities, and he almost doesn’t know who he is anymore. He’s a bit of a charmer, a bit of a jokester, but still dangerous.”
To capture the raw, physical nature of Kraven’s character as he interacts with the characters and world around him, Taylor-Johnson worked closely with the film’s stunt coordinators to make every action sequence feel real. As part of that, Taylor-Johnson also took on much of the stunt work himself. “I trained and put on almost 35 pounds of muscle,” he says. “It was really important for me to do the stunts, because it’s part of the character. It’s the way he moves. That’s why you’re always seeing me on top of a truck or jumping off a building, just like any other stunt man. I want people to believe and know that Kraven is coming from every part of me.”
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Jeffrey McDonald “J. C.” Chandor
Chandor is an American filmmaker, best known for writing and directing the films Margin Call (2011), All Is Lost (2013), A Most Violent Year (2014), Triple Frontier (2019) and Kraven the Hunter (2024). His accolades include nominations for the Academy Awards, the Golden Bear and two National Board of Review victories for Best Picture. Read more
The Screenwriters
Richard Wenk is an American film screenwriter and director best known for his work on The Equalizer film series (2014–2023), which has every installment rated by CinemaScore at the A range. Read more
Art Marcum and Matt Holloway are an American screenwriting duo, best known for writing the scripts of movies like Iron Man and Punisher: War Zone. Read more
