William Jackson Harper joins Ant Man 3 and whoops, Twitter just lost its mind again

The Good Place star William Jackson Harper has just lined up his next film role, with Variety reporting that the Midsommar actor will soon be joining the MCU in next February’s Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania in an undisclosed role, and—hey, wait, do you hear that?

No, okay, there it is. That sound, off in the periphery, like 8 billion nerds all collectively losing their shit on Twitter all at once?

Because, although nobody who knows anything is saying anything, Harper’s casting in the film has, of course, reignited the numerous questions that people have been lobbing at each other online for years, vis a vis who might end up playing the “official” version of The Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards, now that Marvel has started making noises that the John Krasinski casting from Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness might only end up as a one-off, “it’s fine if it’s in a parallel universe” sort of thing.

Now, on the one hand, Harper’s four-season stint as Chidi Anagonye on Mike Schur’s The Good Place does serve as a pretty good resumé for a role that would mostly involve explaining a bunch of complicated concepts to the dum-dums in the audience in a sufficiently charming way. On the other hand, if you’d asked a few years ago how much we thought people would be losing their minds about the protagonist of one of superhero film’s least successful franchises in 2022, we’d probably glance over at Ioan Gruffard and Miles Teller, shrug, and try to get on with our lives.

Of course, Marvel isn’t doing itself any favors by treating Harper’s role as, in Variety’s phrasing, “A closely guarded secret,” which is the sort of thing that does make us think he’s not just going to be playing, like, Scott Lang’s next door neighbor or something. (Unless Scott Lang lives one door down from the Baxter Building, at least.)