Jonathan Majors: ‘Nothing Is More Diverse’ Than Playing Kang in MCU
Jonathan Majors wants to acknowledge just how notable his casting as Kang really is.
The “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” star prepares to take his villain character of Kang the Conqueror to deep places starting in the upcoming MCU installment kicking off the latest phase of the franchise. After appearing as a version of the character from another reality in Disney+ series “Loki,” Majors is now the “big bad” of the third “Ant-Man” film opposite Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
“Nothing is more diverse than the fact that the ‘big bad’ of the MCU is a young Black boy from Texas. That’s nuts!” Majors told Ebony magazine. “And there’s no help. There’s no allies. It’s [just] big bad, and he’s a member of the African diaspora. [You see that in his] lips, nose, cheekbones, everything. That’s him; it’s us.”
The “Creed III” star added, “Nothing is a monolith – not Blackness, not maleness, not comic book villains.”
While Majors noted that the theme of “Quantumania” is mostly about how time affects relationships, he reflected on the lack of backlash to his casting thus far in a major role.
“Well, it’s not too late,” Majors said. “Yeah, I thought it would’ve come by now, but we’ll see. People are crazy. Why do I not think it’s happened? I don’t know. I feel blessed. I was thinking about my sister Moses Ingram [from ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’], who was also attacked. Perhaps the ‘Star Wars’ camp is different. I don’t know. I don’t know if we’ve gotten it much in the Marvel world.”
Majors previously told IndieWire that he fully realized the “game is rigged” when it comes to race in America as an MFA student at the Yale School of Drama.
“As much as I want to go to Yale, nothing in Yale was gonna guarantee access to parts of the industry or to parts of myself,” the “Magazine Dreams” actor said. “I think the arts, chiefly cinema, is a kind of democracy. Because they can do whatever they want to do, in whatever building they want to do it in, but when we put it in a movie theater, they’re gonna have problems.”