“No, we had no plan.”

Chad Stahelski leans back to reflect back on that moment, 10 years ago, when he unleashed John Wick on the world. Even after four movies, a spinoff show, and a franchise that’s changed Hollywood in ways he never imagined possible, it’s clear Stahelski still can’t believe he ever made it past the original film.

“We were just trying to do one little movie, and honestly, we thought about 60 percent of the movie we had failed on,” Stahelski tells Inverse. “It wasn’t until Fantastic Fest where everybody went crazy in the audience, and we had some offers to buy, that we figured it out, and even then, we were like, ‘Dodged a bullet.’”

On Oct. 24, 2014, a boy and his dog changed action cinema forever. OK, perhaps that’s simplifying it just a touch, but at its essence, John Wick is a revenge story predicated on the brutal murder of a man’s dog. That man, an assassin played by Keanu Reeves, and his odyssey of vengeance would captivate audiences, turning a low-budget action flick into one of the most popular franchises we have today. With humble beginnings, no one, not even the people most responsible for bringing John Wick to screen, could have envisioned its success or scope.

Rhys Ifans is part of a great thespian tradition: British actors playing Hollywood victims. In recent years we’ve seen him fight Spider-Man as the Lizard, orchestrate machiavellian politics as Otto Hightower in House of the Dragon, and even scheme to overthrow world order as Rasputin in The King’s Man. But in his latest role in Venom: The Last Dance, he’s doing something different.

“I wanted to let my hair down,” Ifans tells Inverse.

And let his hair down, he does. Ifans plays Martin, an alien-obsessed hippie who sells all his belongings, buys an old VW van, and drags his wife and two kids on a road trip across America to see Area 51 before it’s demolished by the military (because yes, that’s weirdly the plot of Venom: The Last Dance).

When a stranded Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) stumbles upon Martin’s campsite, he takes him in and treats him like one of the family, offering up a vegan BBQ feast and even treating our hero to a David Bowie sing-along. They sing “Space Oddity,” of course.

“For the entirety of the shoot, the crew would either be humming it or whistling it while they worked,” Ifans says.

Inverse spoke to the actor about why he was happy to play a less dysfunctional father figure in Venom: The Last Dance, the way he’d like to bring back his Spider-Man villain, and more.