‘Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City’ Albert Wesker Featurette Teases the Man "Underneath the Sunglasses"

Throughout the week, Sony Pictures has been releasing character vignettes for their upcoming film Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. The first three vignettes have focused on our three main heroes of the story: Claire Redfield, Chris Redfield, and Leon S. Kennedy, but the latest featurette focuses on the would-be series villain Albert Wesker, played by The Umbrella Academy‘s Tom Hopper.

Hopper starts off the video by saying that “Albert Wesker is known in the games to be one of the key villains of the story. We didn’t want him to be a stereotypical villain. We wanted him to be likable. We are seeing who he really is underneath the sunglasses.” Hopper continues by saying, “It’s an origin that brings that version of Wesker.” Director/writer Johannes Roberts then talks about how the character will “evolve and become the Wesker we all know from the games.”

That particular statement has been a pattern in all these character vignettes. The cast and crew, from the character arcs to the setting to even the iconic puzzles, want to make fans of the franchise rest easy knowing that this film is for them. There is not much new footage in this featurette, but the one fun callback they show off is the infamous piano puzzle from the first Resident Evil game with Piano Sonata No. 14 by Beethoven accompanying it. A version of that puzzle has been featured in many of the games since, and hearing that song being played as a dark secret passage is revealed in the featurette will make any fan’s face light up with excitement.

RELATED: ‘Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City’: Featurette Show How Faithful the Movie is to the Video Games

Wesker has been featured in many of the games throughout the franchise’s run and he was finally defeated by Chris Redfield in Resident Evil 5. With everyone behind this film adaptation hyping up the accuracy of the production, it will be interesting to see how close the story sticks to this evil Umbrella Corporation double agent’s journey and where it deviates. How big a role does Wesker really play in the origins of evil?

Fans will find out soon enough as Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City releases exclusively in theaters on November 24 and is a part of the franchise’s effort to celebrate its 25th anniversary. It stars Hopper, Kaya Scodelario, Avan Jogia, Robbie Amell, Hannah John-Kamen, Lily Gao, and Neal McDonough.

You can watch the full character vignette and read the synopsis down below:

Returning to the origins of the massively popular RESIDENT EVIL franchise, fan and filmmaker Johannes Roberts brings the games to life for a whole new generation of fans. In RESIDENT EVIL: WELCOME TO RACCOON CITY, once the booming home of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corporation, Raccoon City is now a dying Midwestern town. The company’s exodus left the city a wasteland…with great evil brewing below the surface. When that evil is unleashed, a group of survivors must work together to uncover the truth behind Umbrella and make it through the night.

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