Fantastic Four 2025: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, Ebon Moss-Bachrach on Marvel’s first family

The Fantastic Four are Marvel’s first family. Since the characters of Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm made their 1961 debut on the comic book page, they’ve been a unit.

They banter and they bicker, just like everyone else, but they also save the world together. We’re all familiar with superhero team-ups now, but the Fantastic Four predated the Avengers by two years, and, at the time, it was unusual for four powered beings to be working – and living – so closely together.

It was not dissimilar behind the scenes of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the film which introduces the team into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Actors Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn were as bonded to each other as they were to the iconic blue suits.

“Too much!” Kirby told The Nightly, only half-joking.

Her onscreen husband, Pascal, picked up on Kirby’s point without missing a beat. “And then some,” he said. “We were very close and, I think it shouldn’t have, but it did sort of frighten people a little bit.

“But we were like, what do you want? We’re playing the Fantastic Four, and the fact four of us are so close is exactly what it should be.”

Kirby jumped in, “I mean, imagine doing a superhero movie in those outfits on your own. But everyone else is wearing them, so that makes it much easier.”

The Fantastic Four: First Steps arrives at a tricky moment. The two most recent Marvel movies underwhelmed in terms of box office performance, although Thunderbolts was met with great reviews, but rival DC just successfully launched a new version of Superman, which suggests that the problem is not “superhero fatigue” but maybe “superhero indifference”.

The Fantastic Four has an 80-year lineage and are some of the best known characters to leap from the page – Reed/Mister Fantastic is super stretchy, Sue/Invisible Woman can vanish and also create force fields, Johnny/Human Torch can control fire and fly while Ben/The Thing is mighty strong.

Their history in film is patchy. Fox previously owned the screen rights and have in the past 20 years released three movies with two different ensembles of actors – of the three, the highest Rotten Tomatoes score is 37 per cent.

When Disney bought Fox in 2019, it brought the characters back under the same roof as Captain America and Iron Man, but it would have to be a carefully managed introduction.

First Steps is, well, first, and then the Fantastic Four will appear in the two upcoming Avengers movies, Doomsday and Secret Wars.

The four stars are currently on a promotional world tour ahead of the film’s release next week. So far, they’ve stopped in Mexico, Paris, Berlin and London, and are today in Sydney, where they will appear at a launch event with rapturous fans expected to line both sides of the blue carpet.

It’s a full circle moment from a year ago, when Pascal, Kirby, Moss-Bachrach and Quinn walked out on the stage of San Diego Comic Con’s Hall H to the screams of 6500 people. That was the moment it twigged that this was a very, very big deal.

“A few days before we started the bulk of shooting, we went to San Diego and we had to announce the project and we were met with this overwhelming, encouraging, daunting, kind of scary, mantle of fans,” Moss-Bachrach recalled.

“We said, ‘OK, wow, we have to go back and we have a responsibility to make this good.”

Kirby too remembered it was Comic Con when the pressure started to kick in, but Pascal said it had started earlier for him.

“For me in my own head,” he explained. “Not from production or cast or the heads of Marvel. They’re shockingly permissive of however you want to come to it, (even though) I was like, ‘No. Tell me what to do!’.”

In the film, Pascal and Kirby’s characters are husband-and-wife, and in person, Kirby and Pascal appear devoted to each other. It’s how they got through the shoot. They might’ve joined the project as individuals, but they were able to mirror that partnership off-screen.

“OK, we’re part of a team, I’m part of the Avengers, or whatever, which is an incredible family, but this is something different,” Kirby explained. “It was like, ‘You’re my guy’. And that really helped because we felt so…”

“Nervous,” Pascal chimed in. “I’m avoidant when it comes to nerves. I don’t attack them head-on unless I’m forced to. If I’m given a chance to avoid something that scares me, then I’ll procrastinate really, really badly. She didn’t let me do that.

“She wasn’t like, ‘You can’t do that’, but she was like, ‘Hello, let’s go into this together’. So she led me into he work in this incredible way. Then I used it against her whenever she got into her head.

“So when she started to attack herself with her own mind, I’d be like, ‘What were you saying to me from the beginning? Get out of your head, honey. You didn’t want me to be in mine, you can’t be in yours’.”

As much as Quinn was aware of all the eyes watching them, and the scale of the production, he knew he couldn’t be too concerned about how the movie, and how they played those characters, were going to be received.

“It shackles you to your anxiety and robs you of any form of creativity or any decisions,” Quinn said. “So, while obviously sometimes existential things can come in, it’s part of your job to try and turn that dial down.”

Quinn had a ball of time with the stunts, naming a set-piece that involves the characters in a space ship in zero gravity, but was equally invested in the family dynamic of the Fantastic Four.

“It’s the shoulders this entire project is resting on, trying to establish this family,” he said.

Those domestic scenes were also Moss-Bachrach’s favourite beats.

“The things that were maybe a little less fantastic and more familiar,” The Bear star said. “I find that those everyday kinds of thing, a lot more about the characters and what the family is really about, those are fun to explore.”

One of the reasons Superman seems to be resonating with audiences the past few days is a return to a hero that’s sunny and bright. Fantastic Four: First Steps will walking a similar path, one in which the good guys are less brooding and more about decency and compassion. Heroism comes in all forms.

Quinn said, “The prevailing message in this film is one of optimism and, for obvious reasons, the world could do with a bit of that at the minute.”

Pascal added, “There are so many different ways that human beings are heroes to one another – in marriage, in family. If you paid attention and you engage in the world, there are large and small heroic thing that any stranger would do for you.”

Fantastic Four is in cinemas on July 24