Evangeline Lilly Reveals There Was More Shot For Ant-Man and the Wasp After-Credits Scene

In an interview with CBR, Evangeline Lilly spoke about filming the after-credits sequence in Ant-Man and the Wasp, and how there was initially more shot than was shown in the finished film. Here are highlights:

On learning about Thanos’ finger snap: “So, as you probably know, Marvel notoriously has script revisions like every day of shooting. So you kind of get used to showing up on set and being told, like, “Oh, here’s some pages. This is what we’re shooting today.” There was one of those days, where we showed up and were like, “So, what exactly is happening today? What are we shooting?” “Oh, here’s some pages. Here’s what we’re shooting today.” This is one of the last days of shooting the whole movie and, you know, we saw the Snappening — well, we read about the Snappening. At the time, we still didn’t really entirely know what exactly that was, and it’s because we hadn’t seen or been a part of shooting Infinity War. We really didn’t know what it was supposed to look like, either! And so we were in this sort of awkward position of shooting something that — we knew, like, the basic idea. We knew that Thanos had snapped his fingers and people disappeared, but we didn’t know… I hadn’t seen Tom Holland crying out and begging Iron Man to “Please, please, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go” and we hadn’t seen the emotion or the drama or the sort of angst and maybe pain surrounding the ashing or the Snappening when we were shooting it. I don’t think [director] Peyton [Reed] really even knew what that was supposed to look like or be, because none of us had been a part of Avengers: Infinity War. So I kind of got a giggle when I saw the final product, because they basically just cut our reactions out completely and cut to ash, which is, of course, much more dramatic and worked very well for the scene, but also is probably a result of the fact that we totally blew it. [laughs] None of knew what we were doing! I think we made it look a little bit more like an ascension to heaven than any sort of negative and scary happening.”

On what she brought to her role in the sequel: “Well, you know, I guess this is so trivial, but to me it was a big deal: smiles and laughter. That was really refreshing. I had so much fun with the permanent resting bitch face in Ant-Man. I loved playing that character. I’d never played a character like that before and it was really fun for me to play someone who was so cold and, for lack of a better word, bitchy. [laughs] In the first film, she went through a hugely redemptive and healing process with her father and we wanted that healing to be represented in some very tangible, significant change in this character, so you could not only intuit it but physically see. So there was a couple visual clue. Her hair wasn’t quite as severe. Partly that was because she was on the run and, when you’re on the lamb, I don’t think you’re going to your local salon very often. So, you know, she was meant to look a little bit more disheveled, a little bit less well-groomed. But, you know, she smiled more and she was sort of able to laugh at Scott’s jokes because, in the first film, he was a stranger who she didn’t trust and wanted nothing to do with. Between the first film and the second film, they had a full-on romantic relationship, and now — though they weren’t together and though they were at odds — she still has that history with him and she still has feelings for him. So to see her be actually charmed by him and laugh and smile in moments that are a little more intense was very fun.”

On working with Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfieffer: “Good grief! [laughs] I mean, it was just a ridiculous, “pinch me” kind of dream to have Michelle Pfieffer and Michael Douglas play my parents. It was a fantasy come true. I have idolized Michelle Pfieffer since I was a young girl. Really, I was never a girl who paid a lot of attention to Hollywood, so the fact that she even caught my attention says a lot, because literally she’s the only woman I can think of who I idolized through my youth — female star, I should say, because of course I idolized my mother always. Michael Douglas was somebody who I had known from Romancing the Stone, but his more reputable work — you know, the stuff that really got him critical acclaim throughout his career — was a lot of the time things that I’d never seen and wasn’t really aware of because I didn’t watch a lot of movies. I didn’t watch a lot of TV. Still don’t, really. But then I worked with him in the first film and realized very quickly why he was a legend and how totally privileged I was to be working with him. So, to go into the second film and know that this man who had won my utter admiration and this woman who I’d been idolizing since I was a little girl were going to be playing my parents together was very, very fun. Yeah, it was a real buzz.”