Putting Michelle Pfeiffer Center Stage In Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania Was 'Always Our Dream,' According To Kevin Feige
This post contains mild spoilers for "Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania."
Michelle Pfeiffer is a national treasure. Finding out that she was playing Janet van Dyne in 2018's "Ant-Man and The Wasp" was a revelation. Although she was a pivotal part of that film, she wasn't the focus. In the upcoming movie, "Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania," Pfeiffer's Janet gets a far bigger role, and we find out more (as you can see from the trailers) about her 30 years in the quantum realm.
What we've already seen of the realm is fascinating, with giant tardigrades and weird rock and plant formations. In "Quantumania," we'll also learn about not only the people who live there — including Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) — but the other denizens of this world beneath ours. Janet hasn't been telling her family everything about her adventures, you see, but she no longer has any choice — she's got to give out information to Scott (Paul Rudd), her daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), Scott's daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), and her husband Hank (Michael Douglas) if they have any chance of getting back home.
/Film's Jeremy Mathai attended the press conference for "Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania," where Marvel President Kevin Feige spoke about how it was always the production's dream to get Pfeiffer to play the role and make her a bigger part of the third film in the "Ant-Man" trilogy.
'It was always our dream that someday we could make another movie and that Michelle Pfeiffer could play that character'
Kevin Feige said in the press conference that Marvel's wish to cast Michelle Pfeiffer goes back to the first "Ant-Man" film, where we saw the original Wasp but not her face:
"I have to say, in terms of the trilogy, the 'Ant-Man' trilogy, there is a flashback in the first film to The Wasp, the original Wasp, Janet van Dyne. We don't see her face. She's wearing a mask. And it was always our dream that someday we could make another movie and that Michelle Pfeiffer could play that character."
Pfeiffer's casting was also a dream of director Peyton Reed's, who shared in a 2018 interview with The Hollywood Reporter that she was always his top choice for Janet."We used a double [Hayley Lovitt] on the first movie," he told THR. "But the whole thing was, 'I want her to look like Michelle Pfeiffer because that would be my dream casting for Wasp.'" He went on to reveal that they cast Lovitt as a double because she had "really saucer-like, Michelle Pfeiffer eyes."
The decision to cast Pfeiffer obviously went beyond her aesthetic, though. Pfeiffer gives a gravitas to Janet van Dyne that speaks to her time in the quantum realm and the trauma she suffered there. She's been through three decades of survival in an unfamiliar, dangerous land full of creatures she's never seen before. Janet has a darker feel than the rest of her family and sticks out because of it, as she should.
You can check out the further adventures of the buggy superfamily when "Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania" hits theaters on February 17, 2023.