How The Fantastic Four: First Steps harnesses 1960s optimism for a 'divided era'

Pedro Pascal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Vanessa Kirby and Joseph Quinn tell The National how they brought Marvel's first family to life

As an actor, it can be hard to ground yourself in a world that's larger than life. Even more so if the character that you're playing is quite literally larger than life, too.

“How do I pull out a truthful performance when I'm a 14 billion-year-old cosmic vampire who's 750ft tall?” British actor Ralph Ineson wonders to The National.

Ineson plays Galactus, the villain of Marvel's latest film, The Fantastic Four: First Steps. He, along with the Fantastic Four themselves, have been pillars of Marvel storytelling since the 1960s, but this marks their debut in the shared storytelling of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But it isn't the first time we've seen the Fantastic Four and company on the big screen. Discounting the unreleased 1990s film adaptation, this is the fourth go-around, with each previous iteration failing to impress fans – probably partly because they strayed too far from the source material.

First Steps takes key lessons from those missteps. Most importantly, it embraces almost everything about the original 1960s comic books – right down to the tone, '60s setting and even the goofiness of having a 750ft-tall cosmic vampire appearing on screen.

“We realised that you really have to embrace the weirdness of it all,” Vanessa Kirby, who plays Fantastic Four member Sue Storm, says.

Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm and Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm. Photo: Marvel Studios

To play that with truth and sincerity, each of the lead actors took a different approach. Ineson concentrated on size.

“I would try to go to places where I could look down and have the perspective of a giant. And I'd focus a lot on my breath,” he explains. “I'm lucky that I have a voice that vibrates through my body more than most people, so I would stand on top of a building, just breathing.

“He's a cosmic force – trying to put human emotions into him is just pointless. So I had to convince myself I was 750ft tall. You get to truth in the strangest ways, sometimes.”

Pedro Pascal, who plays Fantastic Four member Reed Richards, thinks Ineson's voice may have been the key to the entire thing.

“Every time Ralph speaks, my body has a reaction,” Pascal says.

For the Fantastic Four themselves – Pascal as Reed, Kirby as Sue, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm – the most important aspect to understanding their characters and their world was taking themselves back to the space-age optimism of the 1960s.

Moss-Bachrach says: “We watched a lot of footage of Apollo missions. And we also saw a lot of documentary footage from the '60s to place it, to contextualise it and get a hold of the perspective.

“We've come so far from that spirit of optimism and the great space race. And it was helpful to get a window into these missions that would embody the hopes and dreams and capture an entire nation.

“We're such a divided place these days. So I think those Apollo things in particular were very helpful to understanding how things once were.”

The cast studied the Apollo space missions to capture the optimism of a different era, says Ebon Moss-Bachrach. Photo: Marvel Studios

To harness that optimism, director Matt Shakman studied the 1964 World's Fair in New York.

“They had a monorail and saucer-shaped buildings. I thought, this is what the people of the 1960s dreamt of what the future would look like, so let's make all of our New York look like this,” says Shakman.

Pascal, meanwhile, first and foremost focused not on the setting, but on character. Reed Richards, after all, is not just a superhero, he's also the smartest man in the world. What weaknesses would such a man have?

“At his core, my authorship of Reed is that he's incredibly co-dependent. Without his family, he doesn't know how to function. He's lost to his own brain. His identity is related utterly to his family and his position in the family, and protecting them, and being protected by them,” Pascal explains.

Julia Garner, who plays the cosmically powerful Shalla-Bal – the Silver Surfer and herald of Galactus – also had to focus on her character's weaknesses first and foremost.

Julia Garner as Shalla-Bal/Silver Surfer. Photo: Marvel Studios

“She's got quite a tragic back story,” says Garner. “I had to focus on the loss in her life, really feeling it, and then focus on suppressing that loss because she had a job to do.”

Making it all click, of course, was just a matter of chemistry – and that's not something that you can ever produce consciously, according to Moss-Bachrach.

“There's no boot camp for pheromones. Thankfully, in this case, we really got along like a house on fire,” he says.

Quinn, on the other hand, found playing Johnny Storm a lot like playing himself.

“I had to balance his bravado with his comedic instinct and intelligence,” says Quinn. “I have to do this a lot in my personal life – I'm always spinning those three big plates, and you never know which plate you're going to drop.”

But dropping a plate, in director Shakman's view, is a feature, not a bug. “These people have so much messiness, and that's what makes them so relatable.”

The Fantastic Four: The First Steps is in cinemas now across the Middle East