Josh Trank Slept With a Gun After Death Threats Over Michael B. Jordan’s Fantastic Four Casting

Josh Trank earned criticism from some people for casting Michael B. Jordan to play Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four, and some were scary enough to drive him to sleeping with a gun. Trank spoke with Polygon for a new interview and talked about his experience on the infamous film, which essentially took Trank’s legs out from under him as one of the rising directors in Hollywood after it was critically derided and bombed financially.

“I was getting threats on IMDb message boards saying they were going to shoot me,” Trank told the site about the reaction to him casting a black man as Johnny Storm. He said that he kept a loaded .38 Special on his nightstand, adding, “I was so fucking paranoid during that shoot. If someone came into my house, I would have ended their fucking life. When you’re in a head space where people want to get you, you think, ‘I’m going to defend myself.’”

The film ultimately lost between $80 million and $100 million for Fox, and a planned sequel was canned. Trank has come to terms with the film’s failure and reviewed the movie on Letterboxd last November, saying, “Everyone in the film is a great actor, and overall there is a movie in there, somewhere. And that cast deserves to be in THAT movie. Everyone who worked on Fant4stic clearly wanted to be making THAT movie. But… ultimately…It wasn’t.”