The recently released “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” marks the first, but certainly not the last, foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe for veteran “Rick and Morty” writer Jeff Loveness who made his feature scripting debut on the project.
Loveness is already at work on the script for the next “Avengers” film, “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty,” which will pick up the story threads first teased in “Loki” and then kicked off in full with the recent “Ant-Man” as Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror becomes the MCU’s big bad.
Speaking with Variety this week, he says Kang wasn’t necessarily going to be “the next Thanos” going forward and there’s plenty of characters they could’ve gone with. As a result it was up to him, director Peyton Reed and Majors to nail down that character.
He has nothing but praise for the film’s star: “Jonathan was so completely on board and so dedicated, just the most committed actor I’ve ever seen” and goes on to talk about what makes Kang unique:
“Obviously, Thanos has proven himself as a fantastic screen villain. But the joy of Kang, I think, is the fact that he is not a purple CGI alien from space. He’s a human being and so you actually get to see, in my opinion, the best actor of his generation with the most expressive face actually do this tortured supervillain performance.
Kang is a super complicated character, even in comic book terms… I found that, oh, no, that’s the joy of the character. That’s where that line sprang up, “I don’t live in a straight line”. This is a nonlinear person who’s traveled so far across time and universes that he doesn’t know where he ends and he begins. He’s been fighting himself across time for so long that his other versions don’t even know why. You’re almost meeting him at the end. He’s more like Napoleon in exile.
I got really excited about not making him this from-the-bat apex supervillain, but introducing him in a shipwrecked kind of Paradise Lost, fallen Lucifer vibe, and have him in a weak, vulnerable place. Give him that camaraderie and friendship with Michelle Pfeiffer, and then slowly reveal that, oh no, this guy has a past that we can’t imagine.”
The post-credits scene of the film hints of thousands of Kangs waiting in the wings, and Loveness says that’s part of the appeal of the character – you can defeat him, but another variant will come back stronger:
“He is defeated a lot. In fact, it’s almost comedic how often he loses. The scary thing is that he’s not defined by his failure, and he can keep coming back stronger and stronger. It’s not like you can just blow up the mothership, just beat him once and you’re done.
He is almost an existential threat, and the more you fight him the worse he’s going to get. That is a fun, post-modernist challenge that is different for a superhero movie, and it’s going to present a very complicated challenge for them going forward. It was very hard beating one of these guys. What’s going to happen when suddenly the rest of them are aware of what we’re doing? “
Teasing what to expect in “The Kang Dynasty”, he says they’re trying to “build out new and engaging forms” of Kang. He calls it both a revenge story and a bit of a self-discovery story, and unlike with Thanos this guy is designed to be much more human, vulnerable and someone to humanise with.
Briefly, he also revealed that “What We Do in the Shadows” star and British comic legend Matt Berry was considered for the role Bill Murray played in ‘Quantumania’.
“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is now available in cinemas.
