THOMAS Haden Church talks about playing new Spider-Man3 villain Sandman, as well as the challenge of bringing the character to life and the joy of working with Sam Raimi…

How much of a challenge was it to create the character of Sandman?
You know, it was hard but it was also great fun. It starts with Sam [Raimi]. He’s a very playful personality and he likes to laugh and he likes to make people laugh. Sam is almost like an old country gentleman. He’s a very gentle natured individual, he’s very kind and he has a very polite and respectful approach.

I’ve worked with directors who on the surface are team players and they are gentlemen but whenever you get to the bare knuckles of it they become passive aggressive and sometimes, forget the passive, just more aggressive! With Sam, he was never that way.

And Tobey [Maguire] is clearly the star of the movies and he’s very good natured. He and I picked up a lively and engaging banter with one another. When I was first approached about the role I was flattered because the Spider-Man movies are very, very good films. They happen to be superhero movies but they also stand alone as dramatic stories with excellent performances. And this was a very interesting story that I wanted to be a part of.

How did you go about preparing for the physical demands of the role?
I prepared extensively and intensively with a strict diet and a weights programme in the gym. In the pre-production phase I did another movie [Broken Trail] with Robert Duvall and I had to maintain my fitness throughout that. I worked with personal trainers in Texas and whilst I was making Broken Trail in Canada. It was hard work but it was worth it and absolutely essential because I needed to be in the right shape for Spider-Man 3.

Did working out come hard, or do you like to keep fit anyway?
I’ve always been a very physical person but they wanted a very specific look and that’s not the way I normally look. I’m six one and I’m usually 180lbs and they actually wanted me to get to 220lbs and for it to be all muscle. But I just couldn’t. I got to 200lbs and I just wasn’t physically able to get bigger than that. And yes, at times it was very tedious, you know because I had to drive 45 miles to the nearest weight training facility.

So, every day I would drive 45 miles from my ranch, train and then go back to the ranch. It was an hour and a half commute every day just to do what I had to do. They would deliver my meal to the gym and I would have to eat right before I trained and right after I trained and that with driving and two hours give or take at the gym, that was the day. I gained 20lbs of lean muscle which is fairly significant. And when I started I was 43 and to make that kind of change to your body when you are a guy in your forties is not easy.

Did it make the action sequences easier to do?
Whenever I did those scenes it was a lot easier because of the physical resources I had developed because you are stronger and more physically fit. I did at least 95 per cent of my own stunts in the movie – the fighting with stunt men and even in some cases sequences with Tobey.

You have the wirework, the acrobatics involved, the harness you have to wear and you know all of that stuff is very physically demanding. Believe me, it’s not a walk in the park and especially when you are in your forties, it’s pretty significant. It’s the hardest thing I’ve had to do in a while.

What was it like being one of the newcomers on such an established set? Did you ever feel intimidated?
They were totally welcoming. The first time I met James Franco [Harry Osborn] he hugged me and told me that Sideways was his favourite movie of that year, which was so nice of him. And Kirsten [Dunst, aka Mary Jane] was the same way when I met her, she gave me a hug.

I think that kind of attitude started out on the first movie. Tobey was clearly a movie star in waiting and Kirsten also when they did that first and they’re also both really nice people. Sam had a lot of control over who was cast in the first Spider-Man and I think he genuinely wanted to work with people who were right for the part and who he wanted to spend time with, professionally and otherwise.

What did you think when you first saw yourself as Sandman on the screen?
It’s this whirling dervish of practical photography and computer generated photography and they just stitch it together and it’s an amazing thing. Some of the fight sequences were physically gruelling to film but to see how they expand that into these super human action sequences is extraordinary. I don’t fully comprehend how they do what they do with the vast layering of the computer imaging – they lay things in and go back and go back and everything is built up – but when you see yourself up there, well, it’s kind of mind blowing.

Read our review of Spider-Man 3

Read our interview with Sam Raimi

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