No, Jack Quaid is not playing The Human Torch in the next Fantastic Four movie

Twitter (which is what it’s called and you sound silly suggesting anything else) is a bad website that can barely handle the basic functionality that its users have come to expect, but if there’s one thing you can always count on from the social media platform, it’s utterly baseless casting rumors about upcoming superhero movies that are designed to generate Twitter engagement/manufacture phony “clout”/drive people to a YouTube page full of clickbait-y thumbnails and more baseless casting rumors. We survived it with Spider-Man: No Way Home (though some of those rumors were right, in a “stopped clock” way), we survived it with Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, and damn it, we’re also going to survive this current one—which is about Marvel Studios’ Fantastic Four reboot.

For the past… millennia? Who knows how long it’s been, but for the past unclear length of time, Twitter “insiders” with “insider” knowledge have been sharing rumored cast lists for the new Fantastic Four, all of which exclusively contain Big Name actors (even though newcomers and relative unknowns do occasionally get cast in major Hollywood productions). The hot Fantastic Four rumor for a while was that Adam Driver would play Reed Richards and Margot Robbie would play Sue Storm, both of which seem like nonsense, but, for some reason, the rumorers have really worked themselves up into a frenzy this week by insisting that Matt Smith will be Reed (terrible), Vanessa Kirby will be Sue (fine), and that Jack Quaid will be Johnny Storm/Human Torch.

Ben Grimm/The Thing tends to be left out of these rumors, possibly because unlike with Sue Storm, you can’t just pick out any famous person who looks like the character and say you heard it from an “insider.” Naming a blonde lady to play Sue is easy. Naming a man made of rocks to play The Thing is not as easy. Inventing a rumor for him requires some creativity.

But anyway, going back to Jack Quaid, he actually tweeted today that he’s not playing Johnny Storm, using the fact that his name is trending on Twitter to direct people to donate to the SAG-AFTRA Foundation and the Entertainment Community Fund to help people impacted by the ongoing Hollywood strikes—which is much cooler than being some dumb ol’ Human Torch anyway.

Of course, after that news broke, the rumorers started to insist that, actually, Joseph Quinn from Stranger Things was always going to be Johnny Storm. As if anyone really thought it would be Jack Quaid! Pshaw! We always knew it would be this other guy, and if it’s not him, then it’s someone else!

It seems unlikely that we’ll get any real casting announcements until after the strikes are resolved, but let’s not forget that actors aren’t taking meetings right now anyway. If they weren’t already cast before the SAG-AFTRA strike started, then it’s not happening until the AMPTP caves to the union’s demands.