Jonathan Majors’ role as Marvel villain Kang the Conquerer was already soft-launched in the Marvel series Loki – where he played a variant of the character – but with the villain set to play a central role in Marvel’s Phase 5, Majors spoke to CinePOP about how he went about preparing for the role, and what movie villains inspired him.
“It’s funny, because I did go through and I did look at Ultron, I looked at Loki, I looked at Thanos,” he explained. “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.”
Majors, who is set to make his proper debut in the upcoming Ant-Man 3, added, “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?'”
He continued, “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, 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,” Majors says. “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, is set to be released in February 2023, while Avengers 5: The Kang Dynasty is set to be released sometime in 2025. If you want to learn more about the Big Bads in superhero movies, check out our guides to the best Spider-Man villains, best Batman villains, and Namor the Sub-Mariner explained.