The ending of 2015’s Ant-Man made a promise to the audience and to it characters. Hope van Dyne (played by Evangeline Lilly) would no longer be on the sidelines. Soon she would suit-up and become The Wasp she was meant to be, and it’s about damn time.
Not only does the Ant-Man sequel put Hope in the suit and fending off bad guys, it puts her in the title too. They’re a team now.
“It’s not Ant-Man with The Wasp. It’s Ant-Man and the Wasp,” director Peyton Reed says on the set of the sequel “It is important to tell those stories separately and invest in each of the characters’ journey and arc in the movie and one of the big things about this is kind of what’s going on with Hope and the fact that she the mission that is happening with her, entirely separate of Scott, is vital and it’s her mission. It’s not her dad’s mission. It’s her mission.”
That mission is finding her previously thought lost forever mother, Janet van Dyne aka the original Wasp (set to be played by Michelle Pheiffer). Way down in the smaller-than-microscopic Quantum Realm is where she was last seen and the only person Hope and her father know who has been down there and lived to tell about it is Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang. Thus their paths must cross again.
“Boy I tell you, just when you think you’re out, they pull you right back in,” Paul Rudd jokes to us.
When asked how the pair are different in their approaches to handling their tasks ahead, Lilly takes a a beat and says the list of their similarities would be easier to compile.
“They can both shrink,” she laughs. “Scott is like just incredibly, loveably easy going and relaxed about things. Even when it seems like things are as dire as they can be, you have this sense that he’s kind of okay inside…..Hope is generally not okay inside.”
She continues, “But what I think is exciting about playing the Wasp is there is this incredible satisfaction in Hope, something that she has been waiting for her whole life, which is essentially an affirmation from her father, has come. And it came in the form of this mantle. It came in the form of this suit. So, now that she’s wearing it and she’s exercising those muscles that she has wanted to exercise all her life she’s in a really different place emotionally when we start the film.”
Rudd has a different line of thinking for his character.
“I like the idea of playing a Superhero that is not innately heroic or super in any way,” he says. “And I like the idea also of not embracing the role because of all of the difficulties that we come along with having to be so bad ass, and how it would affect your life and how would it affect your relationships and certainly your being a responsible Parent.”
“She sees Scott as a liability,” Reed says about the pair working together. “And I think that was important because there are aspects of this movie that are like a two-hander action movie and there’s aspects of it that are like a two-hander romantic comedy and for me, who’s done a little bit of both, it’s important to sort of get that balance and have her be a fully fleshed out character with motivations.
There’s another way that the pair are different heroes, the functionality of their suits. Scott Lang’s Ant-Man suit, which was previosuly just Hank Pym’s old one, functioned with the button on his glove that would change his size, Hope and Hank have streamlined that process and added even more to her Wasp outfit.
“I don’t have a button,” Lilly says. “I have blasters on my wrists, I have my wings, essentially there is like a reaction system to what I am thinking. So, I don’t have to do anything physically to do activate shrinking, wings, blasters, growing, none of that. I just think it and it happens.”
That said, Rudd’s Ant-Man will find himself with a new suit as well, one that the actor says is a nice middle between his retro-suit from the first ant-man and his upgraded suit from Captain America: Civil War.
“The suit can do some different things,” Rudd reveals. “But I think it’s a little bit more streamline.”
Ant-Man and The Wasp may finally get to be a team on the big screen this July, but things aren’t ending there as Paul Rudd (who co-wrote the script for the sequel) says Marvel is eargely looking to the future.
“It’s this behemoth of a thing that’s always changing and incorporating new ideas and you know, (Marvel) is also always developing one movie along with many others, so different ideas are kind of changing. We’re still in Writer’s Rooms but we have the script now so we’re constantly trying different things and Marvel is really cool about that. They say ‘Let’s try this, look at this idea. Let’s try and pursue it and if it works great and if it doesn’t, we’ll have other options.’”
Rudd goes on to summarize the film as “a weird movie in every great way,” but bookended his talk with us by focusing on what he thought makes it so great, the relationship and partnership between Scott and Hope. Your Ant-Man and The Wasp.
Look for the two to fly into theaters this July.
