Why Peña’s son is more excited than him about his new film
Actor Michael Peña’s new film about one of the craziest cartoon duos that were formative to practically everyone’s childhood — Tom and Jerry — is all set to take viewers on a trip down memory lane and the actor is looking forward to the film.
The Narcos actor, who is essaying the main antagonist in the film, admits that he is a long-time fan as well and has passed his enjoyment along.
“I grew up with Tom and Jerry, and now I not only get to be in a movie with them,” he says, adding, “But even better is that my son and my brother’s kids, who watch the cartoons, too, can’t wait to go see this movie.”
The decision of making a live- action animated movie was fuelled by the thought of serving fans of all ages from all around the world. It was director Tim Story’s special and visual effects teams who created the “real” Tom — along with several other reference animals — in the form of various 3D puppets for Tom, Jerry, Toots, a spike head, a Bengal tiger head and a life-sizes, manoeuvrable, collapsible elephant.
Using both modern and traditional scaling techniques, each one was initially 3D-printed on a smaller scale before being upscaled in Plastazote, a polyethylene foam. Tom puppets were made of polyurethane foam with an aluminium armature, creating a full-size puppeteer model to provide instant “reactions” to the cast during shooting.
Talking about working with the puppeteers, Peña says, “Normally, when you do a movie like this, you act with a
Michael Peña tennis ball, so it was really nice to work with actual puppeteers. It really livened up the interactions in a scene and made you feel like you were communicating to whichever animal, which was much easier to do.”
My son and my who brother’s kids, the cartoons, watch wait to go too, can’t (based see the movie on Tom and Jerry).
MICHAEL PEÑA, Actor