Rhys Ifans

Rhis Ifans portrayed Curt Connors/Lizard in The Amazing Spider-Man and reprises the role in Spider-Man: No Way Home. He also portrays Grigori Rasputin in The King's Man.

Significant roles[]

Spike in Notting Hill (1999)
Nigel "The Leg" Gruff in The Replacements (2000)
Adrian in Little Nicky (2000)
Puff in Human Nature (2001)
Bob Cratchit in Christmas Carol: The Movie (2001)
Iki in The 51st State (2001)
William Dobbin in Vanity Fair (2004)
Jed in Enduring Love (2004)
Peter Crook in Not Only but Always (2004)
Dickie in Four Last Songs (2007)
Vladis Grutas in Hannibal Rising (2007)
Gavin Canavagh in The Boat That Rocked (2009)
Ivan Schrank in Greenberg (2010)
Phil Green in Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (2010)
Xenophilius Lovegood in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)
James Hook in Neverland (2011)

Quotes[]

"I'm constantly suppressing a very wide smile, very excited about it."
"It's a great script, great director and the money ain't bad. It is quite cool this one, to have Spider-Man and his villain both from the U.K."
"The majority of the time I'm me, I'm a human, not a Lizard. That's hard enough. I did have the CGI suit for certain scenes. The Lizard is 9 feet tall. There was one day that I went on set and they had a double, a big big guy, playing me, as the Lizard. I looked at it and I went "No." Following that Marc let me know all the physicality, all the physicality you'll see in the Lizard is my own."
"I had a green suit on, and then this cardboard head, and these big claws. It was the most f*cking insane… Each and every time you see the Lizard, the technology is so advanced now that when the Lizard's eyes move, they're my eyes. If I frown or show any emotion, they're my emotions. That's how spectacularly advanced technology is."
"I dipped my toe into Harry Potter, but I put my whole body into Spider-Man. It was a thrill to work with Marc Webb. He's like Roland Emmerich. He's doing blockbusters, but he has an 'indie' heart, an indie character-oriented sensibility. That was a very telling thing on the set. We knew it would be action-packed and epic and all that. But Marc made sure that the human dynamic was paramount, and that's going to elevate the film possibly to a place that the other Spider Man films got to."
"Curt Connors is by no means an evil villain. He’s not like the Batman villains, like the Joker, who are the embodiment of evil. Curtis Connors is a great man who makes a bad decision: that's the whole magic of the Spider-Man idea. These people are the embodiment of our flaws and our desires that lead to tragedy."
""I'm sure the voice will be toyed with in the eventual edits, but when I was shooting the CGI moments, when I wasn't actually human, when I was Lizard, I looked like a crash-test dummy in a green leotard thing. There were many moments when I had to speak to Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone as the Lizard."
"That's certainly the case here. Curt is a force for good throughout his life. He's a geneticist who wants to help people, like him, who are limbless. In his eagerness to advance that science, he makes a mistake and that's an occurrence we've seen throughout time, sometimes to our benefit, sometimes to our detriment."
" I had vague memories of the Open University but I wouldn't say I looked like any of those guys. He is a broken man who wants to fix himself. The Lizard almost becomes a drug for him, an alter-ego like Jekyll and Hyde, if you like. He's strong and brave and agile in a way that he can't be in his own life."
"I don't know if I can say. You'll see transformations of all kinds."
"Yeah, the advancements in that are quite [frick]in' breathtaking. Each of your facial movements are repeatable, but then you add the face of a lizard. I was, disturbingly, able to recognise some of my facial tics. In terms of the physicality, I had a particular way I wanted The Lizard to move. I didn't have lots of CGI downtime."
"You just have to imagine yourself with a longer spine. Some days I'd be standing on set like one of those 'Golf Sale' people with the pole stuck down the back of my tracksuit, and on top would be the Lizard head. It was quite comical in comparison to the end result."
"I thought, "What a night. That's up there with the biggest, that is..". I was thrilled. Beforehand, part of me dreaded the thought of sitting in a make up char for eight hours a day, but that wasn't the case at all. They did so many scans of my face I felt like a dartboard. The chilling thing is, in the clips I've seen, I recognize myself."
"[about his audition] It was a moment where Dr Curt Connors is having a nervous breakdown, to say the least. I just went for it and ended up a quivering wreck on the office floor. They were obviously pleased but I didn't think for one second I'd get the part."
"Connors is fascinating, because he isn't strictly a bad-ass villain. He's a good guy that wants to do good things and serve humanity and I was interested by his moral and ethical dilemma as to how his apply his scientific discoveries."
"She's great and great to work with. I love her voice… She was fun to scare...Marc wanted us to be really spooked out. They were just shooting her locked in this little closet and I had to go off and shoot something else that afternoon so they wanted a tape of my voice, ya know, wandering around the lab and I did a dark, filthy version that would obviously never make it to the film."
"Connors is sent to an asylum, a high-security asylum, as you would be if you threw police towers across the Brooklyn Bridge. And he's visited by, shall we say, a representative from Oscorp. How he gets into that cell and how he leaves that cell without the guards knowing? We have yet to find out."
"Well, Connors is basically locked up in a very high-security mental institution. It's not a zoo. [laughs] I kept seeing it as maybe a mixture of both. Then a representative from OsCorp appears miraculously in the room. How he gets in there and how he leaves, we don’t know. Maybe we will find out. But it’s not Norman Osborn. But it is someone who is in the employ of Norman Osborn without question. Who knows? Maybe he will be the next bad guy; we’ll see."
"Anthropologically, it was fascinating. If I was an anthropologist, it would have been very valuable... As an actor, it was a lesson."
"As I got into it, I remember looking into The Lizard and there was one of the comics where Dr. Curt Connors goes home, and he's messing about with his Lizard-ness. He takes his work home with him, and he eats his kids. I remember thinking at the time, 'That's the film I want to be in.' Not necessarily Dr. Curt Connors eating his kids, but in terms of exploration, in terms of what this film could be about, that was the film. And of course, it could never be that. Whatever you're told and promised at the beginning of something, when it comes to franchises like that, it's never ever going to be what ends up on screen."
"I have absolutely no opinion on it. No opinion. I hope that when they reboot, there will be more emphasis on the 'boot' than the 're', because it needs a kick up the arse."