'Fantastic Four' isn’t about fame, says Pedro Pascal: 'It’s about what we feel'
The Fantastic Four and the Fab Four came along at around the same time in the early 1960s, and thinking of The Beatles helped Vanessa Kirby find the right mindset for her Marvel movie superhero group.
As in the original comic books, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” (in theaters July 25) explores its heroes not just as do-gooders but also as wildly popular public figures. So Kirby, who plays invisible woman Sue Storm, would send her co-stars – Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach – old videos of the British band at the height of Beatlemania.
“They didn't strive to be famous. They just made music,” Kirby says. Same with the Fantastic Four: “They just had these powers that then made them famous. This idea of a global phenomenon that's been thrust upon you, that was always a useful comparison.”
“Fantastic Four” introduces an alternate-reality 1960s made retrofuturistic courtesy of the technological innovations of Reed Richards. Among fellow New Yorkers, the Four are role models since returning from space four years ago with superpowers and fighting the good fight ever since.
“But it’s not celebrity in the way Tony Stark is a celebrity,” director Matt Shakman says. “They serve a civic role of bringing the world together, but they also are inspiring. They are the leading lights of their age.”
Reed is a super-stretchy innovator and such “a man of ideas,” Moss-Bachrach says. “He lives in a world of total abstraction. It's hard for him to negotiate reality, let alone celebrity.”
Adds Pascal: “It doesn't compute.”
Sue, however, is head of the Future Foundation, the movie’s version of the United Nations, and is the steady leader everyone listens to when the planet-devouring Galactus (Ralph Ineson) is on his way to Earth. (She’s also really good at turning invisible and creating force fields.)
For inspiration, Kirby looked to Jane Fonda, “because I had to imagine that Sue was someone that had convinced the world to give up their armies,” the actress says. “And I just thought, who could possibly do that in the entire world? No politician we know. So she has to be something extra.”
When Fonda is seen speaking with TV interviewers in her activist days, “she's not combative. She's not rude to the person. She's very convincing and she's very calm and she's very feminine. She's so persuasive,” says Kirby, a best actress Oscar nominee for "Pieces of a Woman." So for Sue, “the only thing that made sense was an emotional intelligence that meant that she just sees people and connects with them.”
Sue’s brother, Johnny Storm (Quinn), who flames on as the Human Torch, “is incredibly famous because he's the hot rod of the group and the closest as you would get to a kind of teen idol of the time,” Shakman says.
Quinn, who has had his own brush with cult fandom as Eddie Munson on Netflix's "Stranger Things," acknowledges that Johnny’s relationship with celebrity is complicated. “At times he feels quite bolstered and maybe it makes him feel kind of important."
And Ben Grimm (Moss-Bachrach), aka the large rocky dude called the Thing, “has a different kind of celebrity,” Shakman says. He loves going back to his Yancy Street neighborhood, which hasn’t changed as much as the rest of New York has. “Everybody knows him and he knows everybody. It's a little bit like ‘Cheers,’ and it's this wonderful collision of so many different cultures down there on the Lower East Side.”
The Thing marks Moss-Bachrach's big movie breakthrough after his Emmy-nominated turn on "The Bear." And while thespians who play, say, Superman or Captain America might be forever tied to those roles, there's a certain amount of anonymity in playing a bighearted orange rock monster.
"That's so cool," Moss-Bachrach says. "With acting, you want be able to have many varied experiences as you can."
Then there’s the fifth member of this crew who comes along, Reed and Sue’s newborn son, Franklin, who puts all the celebrity and superhero stuff into perspective.
“What they are as public figures is so secondary to the kind of intimacies of their domestic life and the way that those intimacies inform how to face world-ending crisis,” Pascal says. “How what we feel for each other emotionally is exactly the way to put the equation together on how to fight and how to save humanity. And so I forget that they're famous.”
Pascal loves the movie’s compassion and heart. And Quinn says that “it’s nice to feel good about the future in these times. We live in a complicated world, and it's always been a complicated world, but the negativity is a little deafening sometimes. The prevailing message was that of unity, that we're stronger together.
“These four people are very much the strength-in-numbers thing. They all bring something different to the table. The themes of love (and) sacrifice, that's heroic, and then new life as well.”