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Jonathan Majors Discusses His Inspiration For Kang In the MCU
Image Credit: Marvel Studios
Jonathan Majors is playing Kang the Conqueror in the MCU starting with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and the actor recently talked about his inspiration for the role. Majors, who previously played a variant of Kang in Loki, recently spoke with CinePop and talked about where he drew inspiration for the villain, who will appear in Quantumania and then continue on through at least Avengers: The Kang Dynasty. You can check out some highlights below, per CS.net:
On who he’s drawing inspiration from for Kang: “It’s funny, because I did go through and I did look at Ultron, I looked at Loki, I looked at Thanos. And I had an idea of, just for me, what I wanted to bring to the MCU through Kang. And there’s a certain requirement that has to happen. I think Ultron, Loki, and Thanos, I think those would be the quintessential baddies or anti-heroes. They all had very interesting qualities to them, and some of them shared qualities, which is just a necessity for taking up the mantle. And so once I took those out and put those in the Kang soup, I then looked at, ‘What is it we need for this time period?’”
On what it means to be a villain for a film like this: “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? And Marvel has the, in my opinion, the largest platform in entertainment. And so to bring the big bad, the big bad has to represent so many things and has to be connected to so many things. So I read the newspaper, I looked at history books… I talked to people, I look at my child, talk to my partner. What is it we’re afraid of in this time? What is it that’s scaring us? Because Kang has to be… any big bad is a manifestation of our deepest insecurities as a society.”
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania arrives in theaters on February 17th, 2023.
