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Which ‘Avengers’ Star Inspired Josh Brolin to Take on Thanos?

Even though pretty much the entire Marvel fandom hates Thanos at the moment, it’s hard to deny the fact that Josh Brolin is the perfect actor to take on the biggest villain the Avengers have ever encountered.

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Well, it turns out that a separate performance by one member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe actually inspired Josh Brolin to take on the role. While speaking PEOPLE and EW editorial director Jess Cagle on Entertainment Weekly Radio, Brolin revealed that he stumbled across some behind-the-scenes footage of Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Marvel’s Doctor Strange, from back when he was portraying the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit.

“He was in this [motion capture], and he’s crawling around like a snake, snapping his tongue out doing this incredible performance. I saw that and was like, all right, that’s the bar. This is not like bulls—t. This is something you…have to sink your teeth into conviction, embarrassment, and all this kind of stuff.”

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New Line Cinema

You can check out the interview below!

Brolin and Cumberbatch’s respective characters Doctor Strange and Thanos were together for one of the Infinity War’s biggest moments. In fact, it was Doctor Strange who saw all of the ways that the Avengers vs. Thanos could play out and chose to allow the option that would give them the best chance to win to occur. This, of course, resulted in Thanos snapping his fingers, which resulted in half of the world’s population disappearing into thin air.

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Marvel

We are certainly glad that Cumberbatch took on the role of Smaug, for which he won 2014’s Behind the Voice Actors Award for Male Lead Vocal Performance in a Film, because had he not we may not have ever seen Josh Brolin as Thanos and that my friends, would be extremely unfortunate!