by Ben Miller
Comic book movies can attract some high-class talent, and it looks like Lovecraft Country star Jonathan Majors is the latest to join the fray. Deadline is reporting Majors will join the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man 3. The third installment of Marvel’s most light-hearted franchise isn’t expected to come out until 2022, but Majors will join Ant-Man vets Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly and Michael Douglas, alongside director Peyton Reed. It is unknown whether TFE-pfavorite Michelle Pfeiffer will return...
Majors is a major talent (no pun intended) and will assuredly elevate his role. He broke out in a big way last year with The Last Black Man in San Francisco, earning a number of Supporting Actor nominations from critics groups, including the Independent Spirit Awards. Unfortunately, add Majors to the long line of skilled non-white performers who could get lost among skin prosthetics or helmets.
In the comics, Kang the Conqueror is a 31st-century scholar that gets into some time-travel hijinks with the Fantastic Four. Also, he looks like this:
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You never know what will go down in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it’s a safe bet that Majors will be saddled with the task of acting under layers of rubber and makeup. For all the things that comic book movies do well, showing off non-white faces (outside of Black Panther) is definitely not one of them.
Famously, Oscar Isaac *hated* being all blue-d up for X-Men: Apocalypse, calling the experience “excruciating.” Hopefully, Majors has a better go of it and gets to show off his vibrantly expressive face.
With the marvels (again, no pun intended) of technology, though, perhaps Majors will go down the same road that Josh Brolin did with an augmented mo-cap look, as opposed to prosthetics. After all, the Ant-Man films do feature some of the best, and most fun, uses of visual effects in the MCU. We will all find out when the film opens sometime in 2022.