The cast of Guardians of the Galaxy has exponentially grown over the course of the last few months. Back in February, Chris Pratt was the first to join as Peter Quill, the leader of the team who goes by the codename Star-Lord. After that, the ball really began rolling when Dave Bautista and Michael Rooker officially joined the cast and Zoe Saldana entered into negotiations. Now, we have three of the five members of the team locked in, but at this point, there’s still a bit of mystery surrounding the remaining two, Groot and Rocket Raccoon. Over the weekend, director James Gunn opened up about one of those characters and gave us a better idea of what to expect in his Phase II film.

In an interview with HeyUGuys, while we don’t get info on the giant walking, talking tree this time around, Gunn spoke about the smart-mouthed gun-toting raccoon that’s emerged as a fan favorite among Marvel fans. At the London premiere of ‘Iron Man 3’, the director revealed that the he’s put a lot of thought into Rocket Raccoon and the fans will see his vision very soon:

“There are a lot of people who have a lot of ideas of who is right for Rocket Racoon. Rocket Raccoon has been slightly different over the years, in the comic books, and within my scripts he is a very, very specific guy, and I think people are going to have to wait for a few weeks before they see.”

I’m still convinced that Rocket should be played by Danny DeVito, but Gunn sounds like he has something else up his sleeve, especially if rumors of Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler are true.

Following that statement, he shared his preparations for the character and his importance in the film as a whole:

“[Rocket Raccoon]’s more of a grounded, real little creature as opposed to a cartoonish thing. I’ve done a lot of studying with real raccoons, and we had real raccoons come in. We’ve done photography with them, I’ve played with raccoons, and fed raccoons, and dealt a lot with real raccoons to get some of the behaviour down, because it’s really, really important to me that Rocket Raccoon, who is the heart of the movie, is not a cartoon character, it’s not Bugs Bunny in the middle of The Avengers, it’s a real, little, somewhat mangled beast that’s alone. There’s no one else in the universe quite like him, he’s been created by these guys to be a mean-ass fighting machine.”

I was expecting the heart of the movie to be Peter Quill, similar to what we’ve been seeing in Brian Michael Bendis’ Marvel NOW title for the intergalactic peacekeeping team, but Rocket Raccoon is definitely cool too. I’m curious to see the final character designs as well and hope that it doesn’t end up looking like the live-action Scooby-Doo movies. (Not that there’s anything wrong with Scooby. It just wouldn’t fit in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.)

James Gunn’s ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ starring Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, and Michael Rooker is scheduled for release on August 1st, 2014.