"I'm Jonah's love interest, I guess you could call it. But it's sort of not very conventional. She's a prostitute he's been visiting for years and they have a special relationship," was how Megan Fox described her Jonah Hex character to a group of journalists at Comic-Con on Sunday. As a measure of character commitment, she traded in Michael Bay's favored low-rise jeans for a period gown with a liver-bursting 19 inch waist.
"The corset obviously changes the way you walk and your breathing patterns," she explained. "I wanted that cinched as tightly as possible."
Brolin endured his own form of misery to inhabit the title character, a Civil War-era bounty hunter with a severe facial disfigurement. He described his daily makeup application as a "horror story in itself. Three hours of makeup per day. It's great for the first five days, then it starts to get really old. It was a piece of tape on my cheek, a piece of tape behind my ear and we'd fasten that to the back of my neck, then I had a prosthetic over that, then I had a mouth piece that held my mouth as far back as it would go, and then another prosthetic over that and then we painted it all," he explained.
Director Jimmy Hayward (Horton Hears a Who) added that Brolin even attempted recreating Hex's horrific eye deformity, using very low-tech means. Brolin recalled: "The eye thing -- I wasn't going to bring that up -- but Jonah Hex is a comic book. In reality, if Jonah really had an eye like that, it would have been a little raisin in the back of his brain. We didn't have the money to do CGI, and we really didn't want to. You go back to the Spaghetti Westerns, it's all right here," he said, framing his gaze. "So we tried [pulling my eye down with an adhesive prosthetic]. Within an hour, it started to get infected. I realized, I'm not that committed of an actor."
As for rumors Hex would rely heavily on the supernatural, producer Andrew Lazar dispelled those: "There is a supernatural element. There's been a lot of talk on the Internet about how deep it goes. I don't know where the 'voodoo practitioner raising armies of the undead' came from, but that has nothing to do with the film. Jonah's character is more of a terrorist upset about the Civil War. He kind of may be mentally ill, but he definitely talks to the dead sometimes."