Boy Kills World, starring Bill Skarsgård and his rubber face (at perhaps the most rubber it’s ever been), is a bonkers, bloody, and endlessly imaginative tale of retribution and revenge. Skargård is “Boy,” a deaf and mute fighting machine hell-bent on murdering the woman who killed his family. Boy Kills World features some delightfully gratuitous, video game-inspired violence, a televised execution by cereal mascot, and one of the wildest murder weapons this writer has personally ever seen. But all of that somehow pales in comparison to the true comedic heart of the film, which lies in a pitch-perfect voice-over by Archer and Bob’s Burgers legend H. Jon Benjamin.
As the film explains, Skarsgård’s character, who doesn’t have a single line of dialogue of his own, chose Benjamin’s dulcet tones as his inner voice because it’s the last one he remembered from a video game. But Benjamin wasn’t actually the voice initial audiences heard. Skarsgård did his own voice-over when the film screened at festivals last year, which marks a pretty major shake-up for the theatrical release.
At the film’s U.S. premiere last night, director Moritz Mohr explained to The A.V. Club why he made the switch so late in the game. “I’m a massive fan of [Benjamin’s] and he was actually on top of my list for years,” he said. “When we got him it was just a dream come true.”
“In the process of editing the movie, we did two things: we had H. Jon Benjamin and we had Bill, and we just sort of tried it out,” he continued. “For the screening at TIFF we decided that we would try out Bill, and we realized that it’s an amazing performance but it’s more on the dramatic and emotional side. Afterward, we were like, ‘Jon’s funnier.’ That’s the thing. I can’t blame anybody because Jon has been doing comedy for years and years and years, but that’s when we decided to go with him.”
Producer Wayne Fitzjohn also explained that Benjamin’s voice was closer to what was expressed in an early proof of concept video that led to the film’s creation. In the short, Boy borrows his inner voice from an old man in a cigarette ad. “When we saw the short, that was possibly one of the most compelling things,” Fitzjohn told The A.V. Club. “You’re going, ‘How does this work?’ But it does. So we experimented with a number of things, but essentially our fans demanded we go back to that.” You can watch the short, produced by Roy Lee and Sam Raimi, below:
“When you hear it, everybody resonates with his voice. It’s like audible gold,” Fitzjohn continued. “We’re just as close as we can get to what it was supposed to be, and we really hope audiences feel the same way.”
Boy Kills World premieres in theaters April 26.