‘Cars 3’: Lightning McQueen battles Armie Hammer’s ‘Millennial’ Jackson Storm, Cristela Alonzo voices new character
When the first teaser trailer for Cars 3 arrived back in November, many fans were shocked by the bleak and dark tone. Now director Brian Fee elaborates on some of the story details and Lone Ranger star Armie Hammer is confirmed as the voice of the film’s “villain.”
“McQueen is not the young hotshot anymore, the kid he was back then in Cars 1. He’s in the middle of his life, and as an athlete, that’s getting up there,” Fee explains to EW. “You have your whole life ahead of you, yet your career is starting to show its age. He’s looking in the mirror and realizing, ‘I’m 40 years old,’ and dealing with the fact that the thing that you love more than anything else, you might not be able to do forever.”
The Cars 3 antagonist will be Jackson Storm, voiced by Hammer, tapping to his smarmy Social Network character to bring to life a this younger driver with his eyes focused squarely on the road ahead.
“Jackson was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Everything comes easy to him, and everything about him says he’s faster, so much so that we’ve designed him so that even when he’s standing next to McQueen, McQueen looks old… He thinks the world is his. He’s taking over. He’s owed it. In a very broad term, I think of old football players with those little leather skull caps, and you think of football players now with all their armor, hitting so hard. It’s not the same game. What they did was not anything like what we do now. And that’s Jackson: He thinks the future of racing and the high-tech ways they train and what they can do means they’re taking the sport to a new level, and the older guys had their day, and it’s done, and they have no place in the future of racing.”
Joining this Millennial tone will be Owen Wilson and Larry the Cable Guy voicing the star character and a new trainer named Cruz Ramirez, who will be voiced by Cristela Alonzo, creator and star of the TV series Cristela.
Fee declined to confirm whether Cars 3 marks the end of the story or not, adding that by the end of the movie it’s “only the beginning” for Lightning McQueen.
Click on over to EW for more and a few pics.
