Juno Temple, who stars opposite Tom Hardy in the third and final Marvel “Venom: The Last Dance,” has been enjoying a career-defining series of significant roles.
The London native, 35 and acting since childhood, credits “Ted Lasso” with skyjacking her career to another level. She’s subsequently scored in “The Offer” about the making of “The Godfather” and with an Emmy-nominated Best Actress performance in the fifth and most recent “Fargo.”
“Venom: The Last Dance” brings Hardy’s Eddie Brock and his talkative symbiote, a creature that continually pops out of his back, to a super secret US government facility that tracks aliens and is located many miles underground.
Temple’s Dr. Jenny Payne is, she said in a Zoom interview, “A scientist working at a very, very, very top secret — even more secret than Area 51! — secret place in America where they are doing research on extraterrestrial life and the things in the great beyond that we’re all curious about.
“She actually gets to really investigate and gets up close. For her it is not just research. It’s not just work. She is passionately invested in it from a childhood experience.
“She cares about it in a way that I think sometimes makes her judgment on certain things questionable and creates a great conflict with Chiwetel Ejiofor’s General Strickland, who is technically her boss. He works and runs this military side of this top-secret area.
“I found her to be a very curious and also kind of romantically intoxicating character when it comes to what she does. She loves her job and what she has to learn from her job in a way that we don’t always see people scientifically, but also truly with their hearts. One of the things that they have always hoped they would get to see is a symbiote.
“And she does get to interact with a symbiote! That’s something that for any scientist in the world would be the most mind-blowing, extraordinary thing to get to do.”
Despite this continued career Temple insists, “I do feel like every job might be the last one, so I want to enjoy it to the fullest. And I’ve been so lucky with ‘Ted Lasso’ really changing my life and changing my career in the sense of people maybe notice me more for things.
“So that has brought an amazing opportunity with windows that I never knew could be opened for me. What’s been exciting about the recent choices I’ve gotten to make is that they feel like they’re all different sizes and about so many different things.”
“Venom: The Last Dance” opens in theaters Oct. 25.
