Jonathan Majors nearly walked out of his first Marvel meeting: 'I don't want to waste nobody's time'
Thank the Time-Keepers that kept Jonathan Majors on the right timeline to becoming Kang the Conqueror.
The actor, who stars as the MCU's newest big bad in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, revealed that he very nearly walked out of his first meeting with the company because it was simply taking way too long.
"Listen, I hope this doesn't bite me in the ass," he told Vanity Fair, "but I walked out of my Marvel general [meeting]."
As Majors tells it, the meeting took place shortly after he had graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 2016. As he sat in the Marvel office — and the minutes kept on ticking by — he soon decided it was time to go.
"I grew up in a very particular way and I don't want to waste nobody's time. So I got in there and they're just busy," he said. "And I was like, 'I'm supposed to be here, right?' It got long and I went, 'I'm just going to go. It's cool. I'll just go.' And I got to the door, but then they said [casting director] Sarah Finn was going to come."
When he finally sat down with Finn for their discussion, everything clicked into place.
"We got in the room and we chatted. We were having this great conversation. I think it was three years later that we had the Kang chat," Majors said. "And there's no trepidation now, especially because of who Kang is. When I said yes, we got the whole picture, and what is being laid out is cohesive."
Since then, Majors has gone on to appear as He Who Remains, a variant of Kang, in the Disney+ series Loki and is set to go head-to-head against Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and The Wasp (Evangelline Lilly) in Quantumania. It's certainly not the last time audiences will see Kang either — his character will appear in "multiple movies" throughout Marvel's Multiverse Saga, according to Kevin Fiege.
With so many versions of Kang in the Multiverse, Majors revealed in EW's Quantumania cover story that he had to really investigate what made each iteration unique.
"'What's a Kang?' was a question that I asked myself early on," he said. "Especially when starting the second one, Kang the Conqueror, after He Who Remains. 'What is it that makes these variants? What are they variants of?' That became the question. And I'm continuing to explore that and refine it more and more."
"For me, it was all about one's relationship with time," he continued. "How would you move if you really had all the time in the world? How would you speak? Would you think faster or slower?"
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