It’s impossible to forget the Gestapo guy in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark: Arnold Ernst Toht (Ronald Lacey) walks around torturing people with a flaming poker and jumps out of tavern windows to soothe his burned hands in ice. However, the way Toht speaks stands out as well, as there is something quietly menacing about his demeanor as he speaks in a whispery, sadistic tone, threatening everyone around him. Scott Adkins told Screen Rant that Killa’s voice was based on Toht, and once he was able to nail that down, the rest of his character was pretty easy to build and work with:
“I relied on the voice, I need to look up his name because in the other interview I forgot, but the guy who plays the Gestapo guy in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ ‘What should we talk about?’ Yeah, that’s where the voice came from. And that was a way in, and it all grew from there. And then you put on the costume and the suit and you start to see how the guy moves.”
Adkins also explained that he created some of Killa’s backstory to better understand how his character fits into the world of “John Wick” and how Killa would feel about John in general. Adkins wanted “I just wanted to disappear on paper as much as [he] could” and this process began with finding the right cast for Killa, who clearly takes inspiration from a straight-up villain in a movie about fighting and defeating Nazis. Also, to flesh out Killa’s persona, Adkins developed his laugh and portray him as a “big, bubbly guy who’s obviously pretty mean-spirited.”
