How Feathers McGraw Became Cinema’s Most Terrifying Villain
The character: Feathers McGraw, a lodger first introduced in 1993’s The Wrong Trousers who pays £20 a week to stay with Wallace and Gromit while he plots to steal the Blue Diamond at a local museum. Three feet, 12 pounds of pure evil. Becomes a jailbird at a high-security zoo after he’s caught, with the newest Wallace & Gromit film, Vengeance Most Fowl, finding Feathers, all these years later, hell-bent on getting even with the duo who locked him up.
The material: Clay. And not a lot of it.
Essential traits: A master of disguising himself as a chicken — good grief, it’s you — skilled at technology, won’t flinch at firing a gun or pummeling his enemies. Sweats when he gets nervous. Skilled organist. Refuses to waddle. Has a pet seal. Totally silent and expressionless, which makes him all the more terrifying.
Born from a doodle
Nick Park, the filmmaker and animator who created the Wallace & Gromit film series, was a college student when he inadvertently began drawing penguins over and over again in his sketchbooks. At the time, he was already beginning work on A Grand Day Out, the series’ first short film. But instead of incorporating penguins into that particular script, Park had a supplemental idea to maybe make some extra cash. “I was trying to think of ways to earn money as a student. I was thinking of book illustration,” he says. “I could do Wallace & Gromit as kids’ books. I had this idea of penguins for that. I just liked them visually and comedically.” The illustrations never came to fruition, but Park’s continued obsession with penguins — doubled with the smashing success of A Grand Day Out — made him return to the animal several years later when the follow-up film, The Wrong Trousers, was being developed.
“It started with the idea of lots of penguins coming to stay at Wallace and Gromit’s house,” he explains. “Then, for reasons of economy, production said, ‘No, how about one penguin?’ The clay wasn’t a small expense. So I had one penguin. It became more of a comedy and the antics a penguin might get up to domestically in the house.” But while developing the idea, Peter Lord, one of the founders of Aardman Animations, challenged Park with a different idea: “What if he was a villain? How would that be? It makes it more interesting.” Park was intrigued and searched for inspiration from the golden age of Hollywood. “I started to play with that notion of Alfred Hitchcock and a ‘stranger in the spare room’ narrative, like he did in 1923’s The Lodger. Throw in some Bernard Herrmann music. I also thought of The Ladykillers or the Ealing comedies of that era,” he explains. “Once he was a villain, it became much more vital and exciting. That was the attraction to the idea. It was just the unlikeliness of a penguin being a villain.”
No waddling allowed
When Feathers ascended to the villain role, Park imposed a set of rules for his visual characteristics. “If you said to most people at the time, ‘I’m going to put a penguin in a movie,’ they’d say, ‘Give him a little waddle and make him funny.’ We decided to go dead against that,” he recalls. That included making Feathers “glide around in a very smooth and deliberate way” that was devoid of any comic flair. Steve Box, who animated The Wrong Trousers, got strict instructions from Park: “He’s a milk bottle. Forget his legs. He just has to move at this slow speed, let his legs go under him, and do whatever they need to do. That somehow made him scarier.”
The original storyboard design stayed the same throughout production: It had Feathers with a blank face and two pinheads for eyes. “You know those thumbtacks with those round heads? With the pin snipped off? That’s him,” Parks says. “You’ve got to find the perfect two that match, because they’re all slightly different, so that took a while.” Time and money constraints helped achieve Feathers’s physicality. “We discovered early on that it was all very effective to have him just walk and do small but deliberate turns,” he adds, which cut down on the manpower required to fashion the clay. “A lot of fellow filmmakers reacted in disbelief at how powerful this little penguin was.” Steven Spielberg and Danny Boyle reached out to express admiration, but Parks’s family were tougher judges: “They had a fear and hatred of him. There was a real disdain for him.”
The return of the king
Park didn’t set out to make Vengeance Most Fowl a sequel to The Wrong Trousers. (“Companion piece” is his preferred term.) He was kicking around an idea about Wallace inventing a coterie of smart gnomes called “Norbots” to enhance his and Gromit’s lives, but it lacked a certain type of darkness that the franchise was accustomed to. “Wallace & Gromit films always have a sinister side,” he notes. As Park remembers it, a lightning strike of an idea came to him about five years ago that would lend itself to bringing back Feathers. Park had previously considered reviving the character once or twice before, but “there was never a good reason to do it. It might seem like exploiting a character or there’s no good context.” This time around, though, Vengeance Most Fowl had a looming story issue: It lacked a villain with a personal motive, which Park and co-director Merlin Crossingham deemed essential. Why not have Feathers use the smart gnome technology for his own evil purpose? “That was exactly what we needed and Feathers was the perfect solution,” Park says. “In this, Feathers is asking the question, ‘Who controls the technology that we’re all addicted to and rely on?’”
Various cinematic works helped inform how sinister Feathers could become. For The Wrong Trousers, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca was the main inspiration for Parks. “Mrs. Danvers, played by Judith Anderson, is the housekeeper,” he explains. “The way she gaslights Joan Fontaine’s character and the way she moves in and out of the light and almost glides around like a mannequin? That’s Feathers and Gromit’s dynamic.” This influence remained for Vengeance Most Fowl, with the addition of Robert De Niro in Cape Fear. “We did a visual parody of it at the beginning where Feathers sits back and you see him observing,” Crossingham says. “Every time you see him, he isn’t doing much, but you know there’s a lot going on inside. It was that internal torment De Niro had in Cape Fear that I found particularly interesting.” Village of the Damned, based on The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, also relates to Feathers reprogramming the smart gnomes. “They were part of Feathers’ alter ego. That scared the hell out of me as a kid,” Park adds. “The Norbots operated by Feathers, when he comes in a room, turn at the same time. It was a deliberate Village of the Damned children type of thing.”
‘He’s violent by intent’
Perhaps the most defining scene in the Wallace and Gromit films is the train chase from The Wrong Trousers, in which Feathers tries to escape the house on a seemingly endless system of tracks. Out of nowhere, he brandishes a gun from his flippers and takes aim at our two protagonists. Park acknowledges that the use of a gun might have come as a shock to more family-friendly audiences, and it was because Feathers had to “defend himself” from being apprehended. Still, there’s more to the character than a violent streak. “His villainy is more sophisticated than just straight fighting. He gaslights,” Park says. “He’s very single-minded. It’s just about undermining and getting underneath their skin.” He likens Feathers’s relationship to Gromit as “psychological warfare,” working his way into a relationship with Wallace to divide and conquer. (Even with a gesture as small as Feathers putting on Wallace’s slippers in The Wrong Trousers.)
“It’s clever. It’s smartness,” Park explains. “That’s why he’s a perfect antagonist to Gromit, because it’s smart versus smart.” It also helps that Wallace is clueless and unable to identify Feathers while he’s wearing a chicken-glove disguise. “Feathers can get between them because Gromit knows something is up,” Crossingham notes. “As a trio of characters, they do that dance nicely because Wallace, in his innocence, is easily deceived and Feathers plays on that. He’ll willingly manipulate without care of consequence to any of the other characters. It’s selfishly motivated.”
The train-gun-chase equivalent in Vengeance Most Fowl comes when, after a lengthy riverboat pursuit, Feathers and Gromit come to blows on the top of a boat. Their canal route spits them out of a tunnel and hundreds of feet above land. Park and Crossingham had a long discussion about the best method of showcasing their crescendo of a fight, as they wanted to avoid simple fisticuffs. “That’s not a very elegant solution. It brings Feathers down. It takes him out of the high-thinking villain who gets other people to do his dirty work and brings him down into the gutter,” Crossingham says. “Also, Gromit isn’t really a fighter like that. We changed it to be them swooping through light and outwitting each other, so it’s a battle of the wits.” For one shot, it looks like Feathers gets the better of him: He keeps Gromit in a choke hold with an umbrella, mirroring his earlier deadly proclivity with the gun. Gromit wiggles away, but it’s incredibly striking. “It’s a moment of physical combat that symbolizes their relationship. Then it’s gone for that very reason,” Crossingham explains. “Feathers is a very violent character, but he’s violent by intent.”
His Achilles flipper …
Like any good villain, there’s bound to be something that serves as Feathers’s kryptonite, however minor it may seem. “He has a bit of vanity, doesn’t he?” Crossingham says. “He’s one buff penguin. And it gets in the way.” This is first recognized in The Wrong Trousers when the character checks and fixes his hair in a mirror before embarking on the diamond heist, and we later see him in Vengeance Most Fowl doing pull-ups in his cell to keep his body in shape. Park was taught by Robert McKee, the great writing teacher, to pepper in those brief moments of relatability.
“In The Terminator, he talked about the difference between a one-dimensional and a two-dimensional character,” he says. “At one point in the film, when Arnold Schwarzenegger repairs his eye and puts on his hat and glasses, he looks in the mirror and does that little primping movement with his hands to his face. He has human vanity. We did the same thing in The Wrong Trousers.” Even if a moment like that only takes up a few seconds, it allows people to further connect to Feathers. “You need that element of, ‘Oh, yeah. I recognize that in myself,’” Crossingham notes. “I’m not massively into how I look, but I’ll check my hair to make sure it looks okay. If Feathers does the same, all it takes is that one movement so the audience can be, ‘Oh, yeah. He’s a real one.’ That makes him even scarier.”
Mark Burton, who wrote Vengeance Most Fowl’s screenplay, had a long discussion with Park about how viewers should actually root for Feathers at times even though he’s a villain. “I do love those films where you start to relate to the villain, because then you want them to win in some way. I was rooting for him to win,” Park admits. “At times you have to.” In one scene, while finalizing his master plan to steal back the Blue Diamond after escaping from zoo jail, Feathers parallels James Bond’s archenemy, Blofeld, by showing a softer side to an animal while seated on a chair. “He strokes a seal and pats him on the head, so you can see he’s got that empathy,” Parks says. “But Feathers chooses not to use it. Adolf Hitler probably loved his dog and that’s what’s scary.”
‘We’re not Vader-ing Feathers’
Vengeance Most Fowl ends with Feathers, having failed in his quest to possess the diamond — Gromit slyly switches bags amid their fight, so he’s instead left with a turnip — riding a train into the unknown. However, though Feathers escapes on the train, you’ll notice that Wallace, Gromit, and the rest of the local police force aren’t bothered to chase after him. “He’s de-powered at the end. He’s lost everything he was fighting for and they aren’t even in pursuit of him. Feathers has an ego and he’d want to be chased, but they didn’t. That’s quite demoralizing for a villain like that. I quite like the idea that he’s lost in the badlands of Yorkshire, wandering around, and a forlorn shell of his former self.” Park has a grimmer read on Feathers’s ending: “A fate worse than prison is being out there ignored.”
The duo are both open to the idea of completing a Feathers film trifecta in the future, but only if they can identify a good idea worthy of him. “But I’m not making any promises,” says Crossingham. The one thing they insist will never happen is a prequel that offers more insight to his life. They blame Star Wars for such an impulse. “When I was growing up, one of the worst villains out there was Darth Vader. Then I found out he wasn’t as bad as he was supposed to be,” Crossingham puts it. “I got confused when they tried to explain why he was bad.” Park believes adding an origin story is just lazy from a creative perspective. Do we really need to see Feathers as a chick? “There’s always going to be a badass penguin,” Crossingham adds. “We’re not Vader-ing Feathers.”
Related