Why Grewishka From Alita: Battle Angel Looks So Familiar

One of the things Alita: Battle Angel does so well is keep the focus on the human side of its cyborg characters. Rosa Salazar received praise for her motion-captured performance as the film's titular hero, but each of the movie's part-human, part-machine antagonists has a real person at the center of all that hardware. There's Eiza González as the mantis-like Nyssiana. Ed Skrein was the mohawked swordsman Zapan. Horror legend Derek Mears even stopped by to play the crude cyborg Romo. 

Of course, all these characters are roughly human-sized, so it's a little bit easier to see the people underneath than it is with the massive cyborg assassin Grewishka. He's bigger and broader than everyone else Alita fights, and when he scowls, there's a more than a passing resemblance to Vinnie Jones' tragically misused Juggernaut from X-Men: The Last Stand. He proves to be her most dangerous opponent, at least for a time. She defeats him the first time they fight, but when he returns with an upgraded cybernetic body, he does such damage that Dr. Ido (Christoph Waltz) is forced to transplant Alita onto her Berserker body. When they meet for a third time, he proves no match for the new version. 

It's not Vinnie Jones underneath all those weapons and implants, but an actor quite a bit smaller than Vinnie Jones, which might be why he's so difficult to recognize. Grewishka might be bigger, but he's no less intense than many of the other roles Jackie Earle Haley has played throughout his career. 

Like many actors who become famous before adulthood, Haley had a difficult transition from teen stardom into more mature roles. He worked sporadically through the '80s and into the early '90s before seemingly calling it quits on his acting career. He told Salon that he was delivering pizzas, driving limousines, and eventually getting regular work shooting and directing commercials in San Antonio, where he had moved.

But Haley's acting career wasn't done, just dormant. In 2006 he auditioned and landed a part in the Sean Penn-starring adaptation of the classic Robert Penn Warren novel All the King's Men, but it was his second role that year –– as the recently paroled sex offender Ronnie McGorvey –– that launched his career again.

The part of McGorvey is an unforgiving one. He's a pariah, subjected to suspicion and loathing from the parents in the neighborhood, and targeted harassment from the former police officer Larry Hedges (Noah Emmerich). Haley told Salon his goal was to tap into the parts of McGorvey's life where he could find common ground. "Even though I can't relate to Ronnie's impulses, I can relate to his obsessive behavior and I can relate to his low self-esteem and his self-loathing," he said.

His methods worked. Critics and peers lauded Haley's performance. He won multiple awards for Best Supporting Actor, and was nominated for the Academy Award in that category, but lost out to Alan Arkin for Little Miss Sunshine.

After taking his turn playing an iconic hero, if that's the right word for Rorschach, Haley soon moved on to take a part as an iconic villain: the dream-haunting demon Freddy Krueger in the 2010 reimagining of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Though director Wes Craven was pretty put out by the idea of someone else rebooting his franchise, original Krueger Robert Englund told FEARnet he liked the casting of Haley to reinterpret his iconic role. Englund said he had been a fan of Haley's since 1979's Breaking Away, and that Jackie's slight frame and intense physicality would be a good match for Krueger, who Englund interprets as "a little rabid dog that just bites your ankle and holds on."

The film was intended to draw on elements from the franchise's long history to tell a new, more modern story — one that avoided a humorous, wise-cracking Freddy in favor of making him properly horrific again. Unfortunately, critics gave the film a lukewarm reception, and despite options in his contract for multiple sequels, Haley has yet to reprise the role.