WARNING: Spoilers ahead for “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”
Kang the Conqueror may be the new big bad of the MCU, and certainly the core villain of “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” but he was not the only new villain to enter the MCU with this movie. We also met M.O.D.O.K, in all his big-headed glory, and according to star Kathryn Newton, filming her scenes with the character was like a crash course in being part of a Marvel film.
M.O.D.O.K, of course, stands for Mechanized Organism Designed Only For Killing (at least in the MCU. In the comics, the M stands for “mental”). In this iteration of the villain, he’s played by Corey Stoll, who first appeared in the MCU as Darren Cross. He was the main villain of the first “Ant-Man” film, after stealing the Yellowjacket suit.
The thing about M.O.D.O.K is, he’s basically a giant, floating head. Sure, he has a mechanized body — and a teeny, tiny butt, as “Quantumania” made a point to show us — but he’s pretty much all head. And the MCU stayed true to that, using CGI to get Stoll’s face onto the villain. And acting opposite that was certainly a crash course in Marvel’s effects for Kathryn Newton, who played the grown-up version of Cassie, Scott’s daughter who was attacked by Darren as a kid.
“That’s a really great question. And I’m so happy that you asked it because it was my first couple days of filming,” Newton told TheWrap when asked about filming her scenes with the character. “We shot Corey’s M.O.D.O.K. We shot all his scenes and he wore this big thing around his head, and we did a weird blocking, really, on a stage — it felt like Shakespeare. And I learned immediately like how to be in a Marvel movie. And Paul told me not to hold back and it really set the tone for the movie.”
The added bonus, Newton continued, was that the execution of Stoll’s character required some work ahead of time, so she wasn’t totally thrown into the deep end.
“I’m really grateful that Corey was just a big head in the movie, because that meant we got rehearsals and I didn’t have to just walk on set and have no idea what to expect,” she said. “So we shot like for a week of Corey, and then he went away, and then we shot with this like big floating head.”
You can watch TheWrap’s full interview with Kathryn Newton in the video above.
