Jonathan Majors will be starring as Kang the Conquerer, the new big bad of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. His levels of evil will lead all the way through Avengers: The Kang Dynasty in 2025. However, Majors revealed to Vanity Fair that he decided to walk out of his first meeting with the studio. He told VF, “I hope this doesn’t bite me in the ass, but I walked out of my Marvel general [meeting]. This was a long time ago. I had just gotten out of drama school and I’m running around town and I’m sitting in the office. I grew up in a very particular way and I don’t want to waste nobody’s time. So I got in there and they’re just busy. And I was like, ‘I’m supposed to be here, right?’ It got long and I went, ‘I’m just going to go. It’s cool. I’ll just go.’”
Thankfully, though Jonathan Majors walked out of the meeting, he didn’t make it out of the building. He said, “I got to the door, but then they said [casting director] Sarah Finn was going to come. We got in the room and we chatted. We were having this great conversation. I think it was three years later that we had the Kang chat. And there’s no trepidation now, especially because of who Kang is. When I said yes, we got the whole picture, and what is being laid out is cohesive.”
Jonathan Majors
Marvel Studios President, Kevin Feige says that Jonathan Majors’ role in The Last Black Man in San Francisco is what caused them to reach out to him. Majors made his Marvel Debut as Kang in the series, Loki, on Disney+. However, he was playing a variant of Kang, not the version shown in Quantumania. His performance in the highly-anticipated Marvel film is receiving high amounts of praise. Apparently, love for Majors’ Kang was prevalent even during film testing. Feige said, “In the early days of ‘Quantumania’ [test screenings], Jonathan started to pop in a big way. He’s the highest-testing villain we’ve ever had in any of our friends and families [screenings]. That’s really saying something with a movie like this. Even early on without the effects, Jonathan is his own effect. He was working from the start.”
Feige continued, saying that “it’s always one of the fun rolls of the dice that we do at Marvel, which is to say: ‘Hey, we’re going to make multiple movies around this character, and we’re going to start before the audience has even had a chance to meet him.’ We really go all in on these ideas and this casting. It was a big relief when the season ender of ‘Loki’ season 1 happened. People really seem to be on board for Kang. People are chanting, ‘Kang!’ when Jonathan goes on talk shows, and they haven’t even seen him in the movie yet!” Said movie, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, opens in theaters Feb. 17 from Disney.
[Via]