Last night, at the world premiere of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Jonathan Majors shared some insight into why Kang the Conqueror is such an exciting character. When Marvel asked him on the red carpet what makes him truly love playing Kang, Majors responded with some thoughts about human nature.
“I believe quite deeply that we contain multitudes,” the actor said. “With Kang, there is this idea of variants, this idea of living multiple lifetimes, and there’s a lot of dream fulfillment in that.”
In Marvel comics, there are infinite Variants of Kang, from Kang himself to Victor Timely to heroes like Iron Lad. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Majors has already gotten to explore one Kang variant—Loki‘s He Who Remains—and there’s no telling how many more variants are coming after Quantumania, as Marvel’s Multiverse Saga continues to unfold.
Despite all those variants, though, Majors talked about how the core of Kang’s character is rooted in sympathy.
“Something I heard on a podcast a couple of days ago was that sympathy is our greatest instinct as human beings,” Majors said. “I think no matter what your drive is, no matter what your objective is, no matter if you want to rule the world, there is still a certain amount of sympathy we have as human beings. The thing that He Who Remains and Kang have in common—one of the few things they have in common—is that they’re both human beings. And I think that the sympathy you see between Kang and Scott Lang is just evidence of that.”
This isn’t the first time that Majors has unpacked Kang’s character. In an interview with CinePop at CCXP 2022 in Brazil, Majors said that Kang is a response to our society’s “deepest insecurities.”
What is it we need for this time period? Our generation, what we represent, what is a big bad to us? What are our children going to see? What are our partners going to see? What are our leaders going to see? What is it that our zeitgeist, quote unquote, needs? What are we conjuring up? What’s in the unconscious of our time now? … Marvel has the largest platform in entertainment … and so the Big Bad has to represent so many things. It has to be connected to so many things.
Jonathan Majors
Marvel movies have gotten a bad rap from lovers of prestige cinema, but insights like Majors’ show that these characters and stories have the potential to be the mythology of our time. With Kang spanning three whole phases of the MCU, and Majors pouring so much love and care into bringing him to life, Marvel’s new Big Bad is someone moviegoers won’t soon forget.
(featured image: Marvel Entertainment)
