Fantastic Four: young guns breathe new life into Marvel superheroes
MARVEL’S original super-team has been given a fresh face. But do the new Fantastic Four young guns have what it takes to tackle Iron Man and co?
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If there’s one thing we’ve learnt in this new age of interconnected superhero movie universes, it’s that comic book geeks are very hard to please.
So entering the superhero-scape as a team packs a lot less pressure than flying solo. “I just think that you’re subject to a lot more ridicule if the movie’s called Spider-Man and you are Spider-Man,” says Miles Teller, who slips into a super-suit for the reinvigorated Fantastic Four.
Created in 1961, the Fantastic Four were Marvel’s original super-unit — making their comic book debut two years before the Avengers. Yet, up until now, the foursome’s screen fortunes have lagged well behind that of Iron Man and Co.
Sending the cartoonish Gruffudd/Alba/Evans/Chiklis efforts of a decade ago off to a parallel movieverse, Fantastic Four is now reborn in fittingly modern and gritty style. A sequel is slated to follow this new origins movie in 2017.
As directed by Josh “Chronicle” Trank, Fantastic Four takes the same approach as the comics, presenting a group of relatable kids who grapple with huge life changes when a science experiment goes wrong, leaving them addled with strange new powers.
Science prodigy Reed Richards — played by Teller — gains limbs that can bend and stretch.
Fellow boffin Sue Storm — Kate Mara — can levitate, turn invisible and project a force field.
Her brother Johnny — Michael B. Jordan — becomes a flying human fireball.
And Reed’s best friend Ben Grimm — British actor Jamie Bell — turns hulking rock man-monster.
Jordan, whose path from child actor to breakout star has taken in The Wire, Friday Night Lights, Chronicle and acclaimed indie film Fruitvale Station, reckons he got the pick of the bunch: “But I’m a little biased,” he laughs.
While there was a backlash from some purists to the casting of an African-American as a character always drawn in the comics as white and blonde, Jordan grew up idolising Johnny Storm/The Human Torch and says he was the only one Trank ever considered for the part.
He is also in possession of Johnny’s other superpower: bravado.
“I’m very eager and spontaneous and a go-getter, charismatic, a bit of a daredevil, adrenaline junkie for sure,” Jordan says. “A little bit of all of those.”
Mara, on the other hand, holds no fond childhood comic book memories.
“I presume a lot of little girls grew up wanting to be superheroes, but I just wasn’t exposed to comic books as a child; I was exposed to a lot of old films and musicals, so that was more of a dream of mine than being a superhero.”
Still, the 32-year-old, whose cred skyrocketed with her tough House Of Cards role, was struck by the possibilities of playing the unwillingly super Sue.
“I was interested in playing a superhero who, at first, is hesitant. In this first film, we’re meeting Sue before she has her powers, seeing her being very shy and focused and passionate about her job. So then it’s very fitting that she becomes The Invisible Woman.
“But I’m very hopeful we can make more movies and I can play the other side of Sue, where she really does start to embrace her powers and see the good in them.”
In this telling of the story, Reed Richards/Mr Fantastic is not yet a revered leader of the Marvel universe. He’s more an idealistic kid with a big idea.
“Reed is a pretty isolated, highly intellectual kid who is just obsessed with inventing this quantum gate and being able to explore inter-dimensional travel,” explains Teller, Hollywood’s it-twenty-something male in the wake of the Oscar-winning Whiplash.
“He’s not looking to lead this group, but he realises he’s responsible for turning everybody into the people they are and can’t just hide away from his problems and his powers — he needs to do something about it.”
The actors assembled to play the Four were already well acquainted. Jordan and Teller had worked together (along with Zac Efron) in the 2014 rom-com Are We Officially Dating? and Mara was friendly with both Bell and Jordan.
Mara says Bell occupied the same place on set as his character does in the film.
“Ben is really the heart of the Fantastic Four — Jamie is actually very similar to his character in that way. We all had an easy time with him.”
While the chemistry came easily, there were varying levels of experience among the team when it came to delivering sci-fi action.
Bell, experienced in motion-capture via The Adventures of Tintin, added stilt-walking to his skill-set in order to emulate Grimm/The Thing’s height and mass.
Teller, who has admitted to being bored and/or burnt out on his previous sci-fi action outing Divergent, was this time excited at the challenge of making a “big-budget, green-screen movie”. He loved seeing Reed extend his limbs — “I thought that was cool, something I hadn’t seen in a film before” — and stretched himself as far as possible in his fight scenes.
“I was sticking out my arm and bending back — I did as much as I could,” Teller says.
To pull off human fireball, Jordan wore a suit covered in LED lights “that pretty much mimicked me being on fire, shining light on everything around me, that the visual effects artists could go off,” he says.
Is it a suit he’d be prepared to wear in public? “At some EDM party or in Vegas, it would be amazing,” he laughs.
Mara, meanwhile, was saddened to have only had a couple of days doing wire work on the film.
“Those were some of my favourite days, I loved doing that stuff. But I didn’t do a lot of stunts in this movie, because of the CGI aspects of it.”
Mara — sister of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo actor Rooney Mara — has been asked at every stop on Fantastic Four’s US promo tour what it feels like to be the only girl in the group.
That, she says, is “alarming to me because it doesn’t feel any different than it does in most movies. In most films, that is the case: you’re the only girl. There just aren’t enough female characters.
“But the last two movies I did, there were more women in them than I ever have experienced before, so things are changing, slowly. That is very exciting to me.”
As for that wrong-Johnny backlash, Jordan says he “assumed and anticipated” it would happen. He wrote an open letter to a US magazine expressing his feelings on the matter and stood prepared to set a barrier-busting example.
“I’m built for it as a person and as an actor. So it didn’t really faze me,” he says. “I’ve had a pretty successful career; I’ve never been held back from any job from the colour of my skin. Do I feel like it’s getting easier as a whole and in general? I think we’re taking steps in the right direction.”
At 28, Teller’s great challenge in Hollywood has been to grow out of what he calls “the Abercrombie stage” (a reference to the US clothing chain), where winning a part boils down to how good looking a guy is.
“I was hoping I would get an opportunity to show that I could act,” he says. “As I mature the roles are much more the ones that I wanna play — I like the masculine roles; all my favourite actors are from the ’70s. I like gritty, sink-your-teeth-into roles, with stakes and with edge.”
While connected to another Marvel movie franchise, X-Men, by a studio (Twentieth Century Fox) and a writer/producer (Simon Kinberg), Jordan says any potential merging of the Fantastic Four into one big X-universe is “way off in the future”.
“It’s a great idea, it would be awesome to do if it comes about, but I mean, s---, I haven’t even seen this movie yet! You gotta walk before you can run.”
FANTASTIC FOUR OPENS AUGUST 6
Originally published as Fantastic Four: young guns breathe new life into Marvel superheroes
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