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Ebon Moss-Bachrach got advice from Mark Ruffalo on joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe — and playing a character that is entirely computer-generated.
In a video of a press conference Moss-Bachrach, 48, attended with his Fantastic Four: First Steps costars Vanessa Kirby, Pedro Pascal and Joseph Quinn shared on X on Wednesday, July 9, the actor said Ruffalo, 57, reached out to ease his nerves about playing Ben Grimm, a.k.a. The Thing, a character whose body is covered in a rock-like substance.
“I got a really nice, very long, thorough text from Mark Ruffalo because my character is performance-capture, and I was a little anxious about that,” Moss-Bachrach said.
Ruffalo has portrayed Bruce Banner/The Hulk in the MCU dating back to 2012’s The Avengers. While Ruffalo has appeared in human form throughout a number of his MCU appearances, his character was frequently computer-generated for action sequences and has been entirely filmed using performance capture since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame.
“It’s something I’ve never done before, and Mark immediately— I don’t know, he somehow got wind of my insecurity about it — and he was really generous and sort of went through the whole thing with me,” Moss-Bachrach said.
Marvel
The new Fantastic Four movie meets Pascal, Kirby, Moss-Bachrach and Quinn’s characters in the 1960s, after they have already began working as a superhero team. The film appears to cover the superhero group’s confrontation with the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) and her boss, a planet-eating god named Galactus, who threatens to destroy the Fantastic Four’s Earth.
The lead Fantastic Four characters will also star in next year’s Avengers: Doomsday, as teased at the end of May’s Thunderbolts*.
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20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios
Moss-Bachrach has spoken about his conversation with Ruffalo about performing in a motion-capture role before. “I got a very nice text from Mark Ruffalo,” he said during the Fantastic Four cast’s appearance at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2024. “To just kind of demystify the process of motion-capture, something I’ve never done before.”
Fantastic Four: First Steps is in theaters July 25.
