Has Pedro Pascal found his next daddy role? Maybe. Very possibly. Some say definitely. Entertainment Weekly says “might.” Pedro Pascal might be Marvel’s next Reed Richards. Perhaps. At the very least, all the other casting rumors about Fantastic Four’s fearless leader (Adam Driver, Jake Gyllenhaal) seem to have faded away, leaving only this one: The Mandalorian might get real stretchy real soon.
Marvel is, yes, trying to make Fantastic Four happen for a third time. The characters have not yet been fantastically adapted, so there’s certainly room for improvement—though I’m personally not so sure I’m excited about them “inhabiting the storytelling of the MCU,” as Marvel boss Kevin Feige put it earlier this year.
There are, of course, plenty of other rumors about the casting for Marvel’s First Family. Vanessa Kirby (Napoleon) has long been rumored to be the new Sue Storm, and she’s an incredible actress—but also 13 years younger than Pascal. Marvel, cast a fortysomething Sue, I double-dog dare you!
Various sources are claiming that Javier Bardem is in talks to play Galactus, which, sure, that’s a choice Bardem could make in the wake of Dune. Why not? What other movies are there to be in at this point?
According to writer Jeff Sneider, the remaining two roles—Johnny Storm, Sue’s brother, also known as the Human Torch, and Ben Grimm, the Thing—are likely to be filled by Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.
Quinn is known for exactly one thing: playing Eddie Munson on Stranger Things. (Yes, he’s been in other things, but they don’t have the pop culture behemoth-ness of that show.) With his recent performances in Andor and The Bear, Moss-Bachrach has finally transcended being known primarily as Marnie’s shitty sort-of-boyfriend on Girls.
Moss-Bachrach is similar in age to Pascal, but Quinn is not yet 30, which lends some weight to my fear that we’re going to get a much, much younger-than-Reed Sue Storm.
If this is the actual cast, it’s very … of the moment, in a way that makes me long for the years when we all went “The guy who played James Kirk’s dad for five minutes?” after the Thor cast was announced. But nothing is official. Yet. Someday, there will be a Fantastic Four movie from WandaVision director Matt Shakman. Maybe some of these people will be in it. Pascal, at least in theory, has another season of The Last of Us (pictured above) to film before he can get out of those post-apocalyptic duds and into some nice shiny spandex.
