To audition Wood for the role, Rodriguez told the actor: "I’m just going to read passages from the comic, from the graphic novel, and you just stare at the camera" recalls the actor, who concludes : "That was my audition". The character had a considerable effect on the public image of the actor, noted
Tribute. Frank Miller has stated in the
Sin City: Recut and Extended DVD commentary that Kevin and another supporting character,
Miho, are the supernatural beings in Sin City; Miller characterizes them as "
demons": Miho is a good "demon" and Kevin is an evil one.
Movie Web noted :"Despite the two characters interacting for a significant period within the movie, Mickey Rourke and Elijah Wood never actually met one another until after the project had been filmed. They first became acquainted during the film's premiere, nearly a year after principal photography began." The same website commented: "what makes Kevin truly frightening is his silence" while
Cinemablend judged it was "one of
Sin City’s creepiest performances (without saying a word)". In 2011,
UGO Networks ranked Kevin together with
Miho as #1 in their list "Quiet as the Grave: The Silent Killers of Film and TV". Miller "has described the characters of Kevin and Miho as the two "supernatural demons" of Sin City, one representing good and one symbolizing evil.", reported
Screen Rant. "Few characters have been as mindlessly evil in comic books as Kevin.", wrote Darby Harn in
CBR. The "climactic battle" between
Marv and Kevin has been noted by various commentators as one of the key moments in the books and films of the series as well as the final torture scene,
David Edelstein writing: "The final encounter between this blockish pugilistic slab of beef and Elijah Wood’s Kevin—a mute cannibal psycho geek with little glasses that white out his eyes and who fights like a weightless dervish—is a thrilling gravitational mismatch."
Vulture wrote: "Anyone who's read
Sin City can tell you who the creepiest character of them all is: the nimble, silent, perpetually smiling cannibal known only as Kevin. He was played with expert menace by Elijah Wood in the first
Sin City movie, but it's hard to top the way Miller depicted him on the page. In [a] three-part panel, he has more command of his body than any other character (except, perhaps, Miho), and never looks like he's breaking a sweat while he genially demolishes even the mountainlike Marv. That smile ... that smile!"
Freddy Quezada wrote of the character: "he will always maintain the smile that eating his victims put on his face and that he uses in front of
Marv, surpassing the vigilante, when he cuts him into pieces. Indifferent to pleasure and pain, serene in his crimes as in his punishment, unalterable in the excess of desire as in the lack of it, impressing me and being a jewel that no philosopher of the likes of
Umberto Eco or
Fernando Savater, both comic book fans, had ever seen, and I will finish by saying that between
Buddha and
Sade, then, there will always be Kevin." ==References==