While Ant-man and The Wasp: Quantumania had more than its fair share of disappointments for Marvel fans, perhaps no one felt it more poignantly than the folks in the middle of the MCU/The Good Place fandom Venn diagram, who were hoping with all their hearts that their fan-casting of Chidi actor William Jackson Harper as Fantastic Four leader Mister Fantastic would become a reality.
Harper was one of the most popular choices by fans to play Mister Fantastic, aka Reed Richards, in the Marvel Studios reboot of Marvel Comics’ premiere superteam, but those hopes seem to be permanently dashed now that the actor has appeared as the telepathic character Quaz, one of the partisan dwellers of the Quantum Realm fighting the tyranny of Kang the Conqueror. While double casting has occasionally occurred in the MCU — Gemma Chan, for example, starred as Minn-Erva in Captain Marvel as well as Sersi in Eternals — Harper is not likely to go on to play one of Marvel’s biggest characters after having appeared as another character (especially one without extreme makeup or prosthetics).
Richards wasn’t the only existing comic character that fans speculated Harper might play. Many believed that his character’s name, “Quaz,” was going to be short for Quasar. Quasar, aka Wendell Vaughn, was a former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who gained superpowers from alien technology, and later became the protector of the universe/cosmic champion following the death of the original Captain Marvel. However, Jackson told Comicbook.com that Quaz has nothing in common with Quasar other than letters.
“I did see that they call Quasar ‘Quaz’ sometimes in the comics. Yeah, I was like, I don’t know, I mean, I guess that one actually made the most sense in a lot of ways because I guess a lot of his powers come from the quantum realm. So I was like, ‘Oh, hey. Yeah.’ I mean, it’s wrong, but that’s some good sleuthing.”
— William Jackson Harper
“I feel like the Reed Richards thing was the only thing that I heard, just because it was sort of popping up online and stuff like that,” Harper told Comicbook.com. “But yeah, I did hear about that and I actually saw that there was a theory that it was the character of Quasar.”
For now, Harper can only cross his fingers and hope for a new crossover if he’s going to have any future in the MCU.
