How Ms Marvel star Iman Vellani used her own life to become Marvel’s first Muslim superhero

Ms Marvel star Iman Vellani reveals how she came from nowhere and used her own story to become the first Muslim superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Having your first professional acting gig as the lead role – and title character – of a new Marvel superhero show would be daunting prospect for any young actor.

But the superhuman feat ahead of 19-year-old Canadian Iman Vellani, who plays Kamala Khan, aka Ms Marvel, in the new Disney+ show of the same name, was made easier by the very specific instructions given to her by the wise heads behind the hugely successful Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“All they really said was, ‘be yourself – like this, what you have here, that’s Kamala, and we just want to bring that energy to the screen’, Vellani says over Zoom call. “And that made my life easy. I was like, ‘okay, I’ll just go to work and pretend’.”

Kamala Khan is one of the newer characters in the long-running Marvel world, having only made her groundbreaking debut in 2013. In the comic books, she’s a teenage Pakistani American Muslim, who grows up obsessed with Captain Marvel and when she develops powers has to juggle school life, growing pains, and her faith with her new-found responsibilities as a superhero.

For Vellani, who was born in Pakistan to Muslim parents and grew up in the small Canadian city of Markham, Ontario, as a “diehard” Iron Man fan, discovering the comic book at the age of 15 was a huge revelation.

Iman Vellani as Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan and Matt Lintz as Bruno in a scene from Ms Marvel.

“It was like the comic was holding up a mirror in front of me,” she says. “I felt so seen for the first time and Kamala is such a universal character, I felt like I had basically lived that life, being this Avengers-obsessed nerd and then also being a child of immigrant parents.

“It feels very lonely, especially growing up, and you don’t have a lot of representation so I held those comics very, very deeply. And I still do, I’m very protective over this character. But we’re essentially the same person, I think.”

And if Khan grew up in New Jersey with unrealistic fantasies of becoming a superhero, the prospect of Vellani actually manifesting her dream of being a professional actor from an out-of-the-way part of Canada seemed equally remote.

“I mean, I’m so far removed from the film industry,” says Vellani with a laugh. “I live in Markham, Ontario, and no one even knows where that is. I knew absolutely no one in the film industry. Even though I went to an arts school and I was doing theatre, no one really said that they were going to do acting in real life. It was such an unattainable thing.”

Vellani landed the coveted role, which she will also reprise in next year’s Captain Marvel sequel The Marvels, after her aunt alerted her to the casting call. The then 17-year old sent off her self-taped audition and within days she had to put her school homework on hold after she was summoned to Los Angeles. She describes the time she spent there as “the most amazing time of my life” and knew she’d be crushed if she didn’t end up with the part, but admits the realisation of what lay ahead once she had been cast was “terrifying”.

Iman Vellani at the UK Special Screening of Ms. Marvel in London last month. Picture: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Disney UK

“I didn’t know what I was doing – at all,” she says. “But Sarah Finn, who’s Marvel’s amazing casting director, held my hand throughout this entire process and they knew that I don’t have a lot of acting experience. I did theatre in high school, but honestly, high school theatre does not even compare to the Marvel Universe.”

Once they had found such a perfect fit for their lead character, the creative team behind Ms Marvel started to mine Vellani’s real life to flesh out her on-screen alter ego. The directors of the first and last episodes of the six-part series, the Belgian filmmaking team Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (Bad Boys For Life), grilled her intensely to make sure they captured the North America teenage experience in a real and relatable way.

“They were like, ‘we want to talk to you about you – tell me about your high school experience. Who did you have a crush on? Who were your favourite teachers? What were your favourite classes?’ and they really wanted to get in the head of the 16-year old-kid. I got cast when I was 17 so I wasn’t very far off the character and it felt very personal, the entire show, and so it was very easy for me to just slip into her shoes.”

Inevitably details of Vellani’s real life began to bleed into the show. Vellani is an avid journaller, so Kamala was given a battered journal to record her inner most thoughts. And when the actor turned up to actually start filming at the MCU hub in Atlanta, she found that Kamala’s bedroom looked remarkably like her own. And in yet another case of fact and fiction colliding, Captain Marvel herself, Oscar-winning actor Brie Larson, made contact with Vellani to make sure the novice actor was not too overwhelmed by the enormity of joining something as huge and successful as the MCU.

Oscar winner Brie Larson, who plays Captain Marvel in the MCU, has been a support and guide for Iman Vellani.

“She’s been so supportive throughout this whole thing,” says Vellani. “In the show, I’m the only one in a super-suit and that can be very lonely at times, especially because of how big our cast is. I don’t have one specific person who I’m in scenes with all the time that I can just call up.

“So it does get a little isolating, but she was so reassuring and she’d had so many of the same experiences I had. It’s embarrassing sometimes to be in a funky costume doing pretend movements, because it looks really weird in real life and then on Disney+, they make us look very cool. It’s just nice to have someone I can relate to. And it’s crazy that the person I can relate to now is Brie Larsen, of all people.”

The pinch-me moments continued through production as well. Ms Marvel was filming in Atlanta at the same time as Tom Hiddleston’s Loki spin-off and Tom Holland’s third outing as Spider-Man in No Way Home, leaving Vellani wondering when she was going to come face-to-face with some of her fellow superheroes.

“Every time I passed my Marvel security guard I was like ‘so I haven’t met any of the Toms yet – when’s that gonna happen?’,” she says with a laugh. “And he comes back 15 minutes later, and he’s like ‘so, Tom Hiddleston wants to meet you right now’. And I’m like ‘I came to work in my pyjamas – I can’t’. But he was so sweet and so welcoming and all of the Marvel actors I’ve met so far have been just so encouraging.”

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There’s a line in the Ms Marvel trailer where Kahn says “it’s not really the brown girls from Jersey City who save the world” and Vellani says she hopes that the show will give hope and inspiration to young women like her, who have all too rarely seen themselves on screen at all, let alone in a powerful and heroic role.

“I just hope the show lets people know that their experiences are shared,” she says. “It’s crazy that a company as big as Marvel is creating space for a character like Kamala to exist. I understand how lonely it can feel when you grow up with zero representation, because I felt that, and so often Muslims have been misrepresented, and I think this accurate presentation is very long overdue.”

Ms Marvel streams on Disney+ from June 8.

Originally published as How Ms Marvel star Iman Vellani used her own life to become Marvel’s first Muslim superhero