Tim Roth Joined ‘She-Hulk’ Because ‘I Love My Career Being Chaos’
No actor ever truly leaves the Marvel Cinematic Universe. No matter how much time goes by, the film juggernaut always finds a way to bring back actors who are interested in returning. Case in point: Tim Roth, who first played the villainous Abomination in the 2008 film “The Incredible Hulk,” is now enjoying a return to the role on “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.”
Roth’s re-entry into the MCU began when he reprised his role as Abomination for a brief cameo in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” But there’s no use asking him for specifics about that film: He hasn’t seen it.
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“I haven’t seen it, I didn’t know anything about it at all,” Roth said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “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.”
Still, that brief encounter led to Roth receiving an invite to reprise his role in a slightly larger capacity on “She-Hulk.”
“They said, ‘Would you come in and have a chat with us? We’ve got an idea.’ I was like, ‘…OK,'” Roth said. “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.”
The anarchy-loving actor is particularly amused by the fact that his return to the role sees him acting alongside a different Hulk actor. When Roth first played Abomination in 2008, Edward Norton played the Incredible Hulk. The MCU soon replaced Norton with Mark Ruffalo for reasons that were never made entirely clear and have clearly never looked back since. “She-Hulk” has included a few meta jokes about the re-casting, and Roth was thrilled to add a few subtle ones of his own.
“It was great. I don’t know if it’s [in the episode], but there is a slight bit of confusion when I see him,” Roth said. “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.”
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