Jim Henson’s Grendel Isn’t Wildest Thing in This Beowulf Adaptation

The mere mention of Grendel — the classic monster from the Old English, Anglo-Saxon era epic poem, Beowulf — is enough to unlock a portal buried deep within the brain of every former English student. Since its introduction to the oral tradition, the creature at the heart of Robert D. Krzykowski‘s cinematic take has captivated the hearts and minds of humans for thousands of years.

So it’s no surprise that new details (via The Hollywood Reporter) alongside images from a Collider exclusive reveal that Grendel, as played by Jeff Bridges, is going in a deeply philosophical and darkly fantastical direction; a perfect fit for the Jim Henson Creature Shop’s interpretation based on the 1971 John Gardner novel.

What Is Grendel and What Is This Movie Adapted From?

Grendel is largely considered to be a modern classic, a novel that retells the old English epic poem Beowulf from the perspective of the monster, Grendel, a creature who terrorizes the kingdom of Hrothgar of the Danes for 12 years. It’s a myth nearly as old as humanity itself, the moral largess of which requires only the top shelf-iest of casts. For Grendel, that means enlisting the acting chops of Bryan Cranston to play King Hrothgar, Dave Bautista to play the warrior Beowulf, and award-winning musician and producer T Bone Burnett to play the blind, harp-playing Shaper.

And it seems that everyone in the cast and crew is bringing some big ideas into their characterizations.

For Kryzkowski, that means digging into very meaty, human ideas. The book always fascinated him, he said, “because we read all sorts of books [in high school] — To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye and Death Be Not Proud — and they all stirred conversation, but something about Grendel, the whole classroom lit up. Everybody had something to say and everybody had their own theory, and this was competing with their personal philosophies, their religious leanings, their political leanings.”

In his own words, the novelist John Gardner has said that Grendel is based on the philosopher John-Paul Sartre, whose worldview he said in a 1978 interview, “He’s a horror intellectually, figuratively, and morally, but he’s a wonderful writer and anything he says you believe, at least for the moment, because of the way he says it.”

Jeff Bridges, according to Kryzkowski, “talked a lot about the yin and the yang of every person, and that Grendel, he’s really a character in conflict, and I think that he found that really interesting.”

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Jeff Bridges, Dave Bautista to Lead Live-Action Grendel Movie from Jim Henson Company

Jeff Bridges, Dave Bautista, Bryan Cranston, and Sam Elliott will star in an upcoming adaptation of John Gardner’s Grendel.

Bridges’ interest and understanding of the story of Grendel and Beowulf is what ultimately helped get T Bone Burnett on board. “He wanted me to meet T Bone right away,” Kryzkowski said. “He said, ‘I think you’re really going to like him’ … [so] T Bone hopped on a Zoom with Jeff and me, and he just has this wonderful, soft, whispery voice that sounded like you would want him to read the novel to you.”

With Burnett on board and deeply into the Sartre of it all (due to a production he was already working on, the acclaimed musician and producer “started sharing poems that were inspiring, a couple of recent songs that he had written that were so incredibly in the flavor of what we were doing,” Kryzkowski explained.

“When he read Grendel, T Bone was like, ‘Everything in this is stuff I’m thinking really hard about right now, so I’d really like to articulate that in the music of this film,'” Kryzkowski added.

If all of this feels like the perfect marriage with the Jim Henson Creature Shop’s almost Labyrinth-ian and otherworldly monster puppet — that’s by design. Kryzkowski admits that “a fourth or a fifth of the movie will be on stages” that evoke a “very, very handmade, very fantasy-driven” vibe.

A lot of the film, however, will live in a more grounded, real world place. “I’d like to use as many physical outdoor locations as possible, just because it’ll have that Terrence Malick texture [where] the camera is free, and it’s with Grendel, and it’s able to just live with him. I think that will feel really wonderful for the audience.”

In the end, Grendel the novel, the film, and Grendel the character, are really stand-ins for the very real, existential issues we’re all facing today. “We are all asking the big questions, life’s big questions,” Kryzkowski said. “Grendel just asks them over and over and over again in about 20 different, really interesting ways.”