A few days ago, Evangeline Lilly recalled how she felt unprepared for the mid-credits twist of Ant-Man and the Wasp. Though her co-star Paul Rudd was apparently informed beforehand of the universe-wide genocide that would conclude Avengers: Infinity War, Lilly and her onscreen family weren’t entirely sure what was going on even on the day of shooting, and that reportedly shows in the death scenes they shot.
Speaking to CBR, the actress known for playing Hope van Dyne in the MCU reflected on how neither she nor her fellow victims Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas knew how to act out the experience of being disintegrated.
“I kind of got a giggle when I saw the final product, because they basically just cut our reactions out completely and cut to ash, which is, of course, much more dramatic and worked very well for the scene, but also is probably a result of the fact that we totally blew it. [laughs] None of [us] knew what we were doing! I think we made it look a little bit more like an ascension to heaven [rather] than any sort of negative and scary happening.”
It was only when Lilly saw the dusting suffered by her fellow superheroes that she began to grasp how the scene should’ve been handled.
“We were in this sort of awkward position of shooting something that — we knew, like, the basic idea. We knew that Thanos had snapped his fingers and people disappeared, but we didn’t know… I hadn’t seen Tom Holland crying out and begging Iron Man to ‘Please, please, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go,’ and we hadn’t seen the emotion or the drama or the sort of angst and maybe pain surrounding the ashing or the Snappening when we were shooting it. I don’t think [director] Peyton [Reed] really even knew what that was supposed to look like or be, because none of us had been a part of Avengers: Infinity War.”
Though Reed’s feature generally served as a self-contained, low-stakes outing that stands in contrast to the gloomy events of Infinity War, this post-credits teaser ropes the characters into the MCU’s larger storyline while leaving Scott Lang stranded in the Quantum Realm. It probably won’t be until next year’s Avengers 4 that Ant-Man will have a chance of escaping this mysterious place, though the same scene also seems to leave a hint or two on how Scott’s current situation could prove significant in the Infinity War sequel.
Speaking of which, while things didn’t end so well for Hope in Ant-Man and the Wasp, you can expect to see her again in Avengers 4, which is set to hit theaters on May 3rd, 2019.
