Jonathan Majors reveals he walked out of his first meeting with Marvel

It would probably be an understatement to note that Jonathan Majors is having a moment; better, probably, to say that he’s having the moment—the point where a well-respected young actor with a couple of break-out performances under his belt (Lovecraft Country, The Last Black Man In San Francisco) ascends into the Hollywood firmament. And while Majors actually has a couple of big performances on the way (including the upcoming Creed III and well-received festival feature Magazine Dreams), the obvious sign of his ascension is his role as Marvel’s new marquee bad guy in this week’s Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania—a part that almost didn’t happen, after Majors walked out of his very first meeting with Marvel several years ago.

This is per a new interview the actor gave to Vanity Fair this week, in which he revealed that he actually initially walked out of his first meeting with the company when he was fresh out of drama school.

I hope this doesn’t bite me in the ass, but I walked out of my Marvel general [meeting]. This was a long time ago. I had just gotten out of drama school and I’m running around town and I’m sitting in the office. I grew up in a very particular way and I don’t want to waste nobody’s time. So I got in there and they’re just busy. And I was like, “I’m supposed to be here, right?” It got long and I went, “I’m just going to go. It’s cool. I’ll just go.” And I got to the door, but then they said [casting director] Sarah Finn was going to come. We got in the room and we chatted. We were having this great conversation. I think it was three years later that we had the Kang chat.

Now, though, Majors says he has no reservations about his role in the Marvel machine (which expected to extend through several films, as Kang becomes a primary antagonist for the studio’s upcoming movies), saying that, “There’s no trepidation now, especially because of who Kang is. When I said yes, we got the whole picture, and what is being laid out is cohesive.” That being said, he did note some ongoing discomfort with the ways his sudden stardom may end up impacting his life (and heaped some praise on Creed co-star Michael B. Jordan in the process): “I don’t bother nobody. I’m not interested in the fuckery of the industry… Michael is such a good example of a movie star because movie stars have to appeal to the bourgeois and the proletariat. Movie stars can show a film in Montana. Movie stars are dangerous to politicians. It’s a different type of burden.”