Wallace and Gromit’s makers on the terrifying return of Feathers McGraw: ‘People genuinely hate him’
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Aardman has produced its first feature-length ‘Wallace & Gromit’ since 2008, and finds an old foe plotting revenge. Adam White speaks to the film’s cast and crew about Britishness, artificial intelligence, and moving forward after the death of the original Wallace, actor Peter Sallis.
![[Men behind the moulding: Merlin Crossingham and Nick Park on the ‘Vengeance Most Fowl’ set]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/19/13/480284.jpg)
Nick Park, Aardman extraordinaire and the genius behind Wallace and Gromit, is talking to me about the worst creature on the planet. “Over the years, I’ve been constantly surprised by the amount of people who genuinely hate him,” he says, with the gentle giddiness of your favourite art teacher. “They think he’s evil. But look…” He holds a model of the beast in question up to the lens of his Zoom camera. “He’s only a four-inch tall piece of plasticine.”.
Feathers McGraw – thug, monster, penguin with a glove on his head – first debuted in Aardman’s Oscar-winning 1993 short The Wrong Trousers, in which he (shiftily) moved in with Wallace and Gromit while (eerily) plotting to steal a priceless diamond from the local museum (nastily). Feathers’ rottenness served as a blueprint for the series in the aftermath, the beloved duo going up against a cyborg dog, a werewolf-rabbit and a baker-murdering serial killer. And now, in the new Wallace and Gromit feature-length film Vengeance Most Fowl, Feathers is back: the most ghoulish presence on the BBC One Christmas Day line-up who isn’t in the Gavin & Stacey finale.
“He was quite late to the party, actually,” says Merlin Crossingham, Aardman veteran and Park’s co-director on the film. “The script began as a half-hour film about Wallace inventing a smart-gnome. But the more we worked on it, we realised it was lacking something – some menace, some motivation. And Feathers came about like a lightning strike. If we were ever going to bring him back, this was it.”.
