The internet definitely had some thoughts about Jared Leto’s Skeletor voice when the first Masters of the Universe trailer dropped, with many fans suspecting the Oscar winner was doing a riff on Tom Hardy’s Bane voice from The Dark Knight Rises. But Masters of the Universe director Travis Knight insists that’s not the case.
“He’s definitely not doing an homage to Tom Hardy’s Bane,” Knight told me during a CinemaCon reception after Amazon MGM showed the press a selection of footage from Masters of the Universe.
“It’s one of the things that Jared and I spoke about quite a bit, actually, because there have been multiple iterations of Skeletor, of course, the iconic one, [Alan] Oppenheimer, where it kind of established everything. We knew that we didn’t want to do an Alan Oppenheimer impression. Now, part of that reason is you gotta go back to the genesis of where that voice even came from.”
Knight continued, “This came out in the ‘80s. Skeletor was kind of scary and so they actually made the choice to give him a ridiculous voice to take the edge off of how scary he looked [to children]. They did. And it was very funny, and it was very iconic. For us, we want to make sure that Skeletor embodied all those things that we loved about Skeletor. So he looked cool, he was funny, he was scary as hell, and he had a very distinctive voice and laugh.”
The director said Leto “spent a considerable amount of time actually trying to figure out what that voice would sound like. Ultimately, he landed on something that I’m delighted with. It’s something that has menace. It has an air of theatricality, which is always something that was part of Skeletor. He was very, very dramatic. He was very showy. He always liked putting on a show and getting a response. So it’s theatrical, it’s scary, and he can even be quite funny in his insecurities. And so it was definitely not influenced by Bane. It was not influenced by anyone other than kind of just knowing what came before it and then trying to find your own version of it.”
Knight also said Leto knew going into the movie that he would be behind a mask the whole time, and that the actor, who was a He-Man fan as a kid, wanted to do Skeletor “justice”.
“Any actor trying to fill those big boots would have to know that basically no one will even ever see your face,” Knight said. “It was important for us to do it justice. But yeah, he knew that it was important to me that Skeletor looked like Skeletor, which means he had a skull face. And that was something we kind of had to sell everyone on. But Jared was all in.”
Knight also explained that the nuances of Leto’s performance on set were vital to the animators who had to create the movements and expressions on Skeletor’s face: “The animators would look at what he does and try to get that kind of idiosyncratic detail in his face. And they did an amazing job. It’s kind of a tricky thing, [to] see how far you can push it, expressions on a skull. But we figured he’s an alien, maybe he has a little more flexibility than our version of a skull does. But he has so much character and personality. I’m just delighted by what we got.”
Masters of the Universe will be released theatrically in the U.S. on June 5, 2026.
