A few weeks ago, we reported that Fox had narrowed the pool of candidates for the role of Doctor Doom in its Fantastic Four reboot to four actors: Sam Riley, Eddie Redmayne, Domnhall Gleeson and Toby Kebbell. Now, it appears that we have a winner, with news that Kebbell has been officially offered the part.
The casting comes as somewhat of a surprise, considering Kebbell is the least known of all the candidates, with mostly minor supporting roles (in everything from War Horse to Wrath of the Titans) to his name. All the other actors in consideration have at least had lead roles before; Riley starred as Sal Paradise in Beat biopic On the Road, Redmayne played Marius in Les Miserables and starred in My Week with Marilyn as filmmaker Colin Clark, and Gleeson had a big hit last fall with About Time. Evidently, Fox believes that Kebbell has the acting ability to bring such an iconic villain to life, though the rest of us will have to wait until the film’s release in June of next year to see him take on such a large role.
Fox has been skewing young with its choices for the leads in this reboot. Miles Teller (The Spectacular Now) is set to play brilliant scientist Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, Kate Mara (House of Cards) will play Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman, Michael B. Jordan will play Johnny Storm/The Human Torch, and Jamie Bell will play Ben Grimm/The Thing. All of those are unusual but highly intriguing choices, particularly Bell, given that his slender frame and quiet screen presence make him the polar opposite of most actors whom fans of the comics would pick to play the hulking Thing.
Now that all the main players have been cast, director Josh Trank (Chronicle) is planning to roll cameras on the reboot this spring. He’s working from a script primarily written by Simon Kinberg, the scribe behind X-Men: Days of Future Past and the already-announced X-Men: Apocalypse, so how that highly anticipated superhero blockbuster turns out in a few months will likely give us a better idea of whether we should be excited for this latest stab at reviving the iconic quartet.
Fantastic Four arrives on June 19th, 2015.
