It’s the final week of filming for Venom , and Tom Hardy is standing in front of a cable car wearing a grey sweatshirt, jeans and simple sneakers, his hair slightly ruffled. Looking like he just walked in off the street, this Tom Hardy is exactly the one you’d expect to see in real life. Instead, he’s preparing to play a character who’s wrestling with a much more dangerous side.

On set, there is no physical embodiment of Venom, the dangerous symbiote who merges with Eddie Brock and is splashed across the branding for the the upcoming movie. But the presence of the iconic Marvel character hangs over the set, with crew members wearing hoodies sporting the Venom movie logo revealed at Brazil Comic-Con

Watch the Brazil Comic-Con panel for Venom below:

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Venom's 30 Most WTF Moments 31 IMAGES

All of the visual effects work for Venom takes place after filming wraps, so Hardy is essentially performing as two characters: Eddie Brock, a journalist looking to undercover the evildoing of the Life Foundation organization, and Venom, the symbiote that makes him an antihero.“Tom voices the character at all times, and that vocal performance is so rich and so characterful that we have plenty to start working with straightaway,” says VFX supervisor Paul Franklin during an exclusive visit to the movie’s set. “So we’re capturing Tom’s physical performance, and that, in turn, is also informing what’s going on with the digital character.”The scene Hardy is filming takes place soon after Venom first bonds with Eddie. The crew used the San Francisco setting to their advantage; Eddie and Venom argue for control of Eddie’s body -- a scene out of one of the trailers -- right inside of an iconic cable car as it travels through the city.For such a seemingly simple scene, there’s a lot of preparation that goes into making it happen. One cable car with an entire crew full of people leaves first to prep for the actual shoot with Tom. The key video crew follows in a van behind the cable car, which is where director Ruben Fleischer will be stationed for the morning.As for Hardy, his performance requires getting into the very different the physicality of the two characters he’s playing. For this particular scene, Eddie’s body works against him as Venom takes over.Oliver Scholl, the production designer on Venom, says Hardy’s role requires a lot of imagination. “It’s like trying to imagine this creature, having them in yourself, and he’s very experimental about it,” he tells me. “He’s trying out different versions of what he could be saying, thinking, how the interaction would be.”“Interaction is the wrong word, because he’s interacting with himself. [It’s] Tom finding Venom, or trying to find him inside him, like, bringing him out and playing this schizophrenic personality, and I think it’s a very different tone.”Venom begins and ends with Hardy. It’s his physical performance that informs the way the VFX team designs the symbiote launching out of Eddie’s body, whether it’s inky black tentacles lashing out at would-be attackers or the Venom head coming out of Eddie to talk to him face-to-face. Franklin, who previously worked with Hardy on The Dark Knight Rises, used Hardy’s performance as a launching point, and his team created a digital model of him to track the actor’s movements “very, very precisely.” That means a lot of Hardy working against blue screen, which Franklin noted the actor has “very much embraced.”

Watch the first IGN Premiere behind-the-scenes look at Venom below:

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But it’s not all VFX work that turns Hardy into Venom. Franklin’s team used practical effects tricks, like raising people up on wires, to imitate a real life effect of Venom swelling over Hardy to turn him into the larger, alien creature we’ve seen in trailers.“Our grips built a fantastic rig using a regular camera dollie with a flat platform on the end of the arm, and the pneumatic lift can then lift Tom off the ground, so he rises up to become the full height of Venom,” Franklin explains. “We’ve done lots of amazing, physical special effects. Lots of fantastic stunts have been filmed for the movie, as well. That grounds it in terms of bringing a sense of realism to the project.”Of course, Venom isn’t entirely grounded in realism. “In terms of the actual character itself, we’re trying not to constrain ourselves too much,” Franklin says. “We really want to realize the amazing potential of this character, which I don’t think is anything that people have ever seen before.”

IGN Premiere is rolling out an exclusive week of Venom content. Tune in tomorrow for new information on how the symbiotes come to Earth in Venom. And for plenty more on Venom, make sure to watch yesterday's IGN Premiere video of how the lethal protector is being reinvented without Spider-Man

Terri Schwartz is Editorial Manager of Entertainment at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz