The new issue of Empire hits newsstands next Thursday, and just to give you a taste of what to expect, here's a new batch of stills from Thor: The Dark World, offering a good look at Christopher Eccleston's Malekith and his armada, as well as the returning Asgardians. Yes, the new issue, along with much other goodness, holds these new stills and lots from the cast and crew of the film.
"You know, we are killing Asgardians in this movie," says director Alan Taylor inside. "It turns out immortality isn't all that it was cracked up to be."
Explains producer Craig Kyle, "Asgard at the beginning of the first film was at a time of peace. Now our guys have been fighting for over a year, constantly. It's a time of war.
"When the Bifrost was broken at the end of the first film, Odin had to conjure a lot of dark energy and go through a lot of personal sacrifice to try and get his son back to Earth. And it was a one-shot deal. If Thor didn't succeed, without the Tesseract he couldn't have got back again. And in our film, finally the Bifrost has been rebuilt, but during that time, when the cops were largely cut off from the rest of the universe, you had miscreants that came in from outside the Nine Realms, pillaging and destroying and causing havoc. So that's what our guys have been doing now - trying to put all these fires out across the Nine Realms."
Returning cast include Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Tom Hiddleston as the treacherous Loki, Natalie Portman as scientist Jane Foster, Anthony Hopkins as Odin, Idris Elba as Heimdall, Rene Russo as Frigga, Stellan Skarsgard as Dr Selvig, Kat Dennings as Darcy, Jaimie Alexander as Sif and Ray Stevenson as Volstagg. Among the newcomers are Christopher Eccleston as big bad Malekith, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Algrim and Zachary Levi as Fandral.
Thor: The Dark World hits cinemas in the UK on October 30 and in the US on November 8. The new issue of Empire, with much much more on the film, hits newsstands next Thursday. For more on the film while you wait, check out our trailer breakdown here and teaser trailer breakdown here.
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