Ant-Man and the Wasp director Peyton Reed has opened up about collaborating with Evangeline Lilly on her character Hope Van Dyne, revealing she was adamant that she looked sweaty and unglamorous during its action scenes.
“It really was about progressing these characters that we met in the first movie,” Reed explained to me recently when I quizzed him about helping to make its female characters feel unique.
“We spent a lot of time with Hope in the first film, but she didn’t get the suit until the end of the first movie. So it really was about, you know, once she has the suit, this thing she had wanted for so long, what is her version of a Marvel hero?”
“Evangeline and I really worked, early on from the story stage, we talked about the general things, how she moves in fights, to these really specific things.”
“It was really important to Evangeline. She was like, ‘I don’t want to be glam. When I fight I want to sweat. And I want to have just a clean ponytail so that helmet can come on and off. I want to feel like I am in it. She had a very pragmatic approach to the character of Wasp, and in addition to all the emotional stuff in the movie, too.”
As the film’s title suggests, Lilly’s Hope van Dyne/Wasp is well and truly the joint lead of “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” alongside Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang. That’s plainly evident from the prologue to the film, and Reed admitted that was always his intention with the blockbuster’s very first scene.
“We have a prologue to this movie, which is somewhat similar to the prologue in the fist ‘Ant-Man,’ which featured a younger 80s Hank Pym. What we wanted to do was show a quick glimpse between Young Hank and Janet and 7-year-old Hope.”
“It was important because it set up that mission for Janet, to set it up emotionally, and what it means emotionally to Hope. And it didn’t escape us that in this movie, which was really Wasp’s coming out party, in which she is also a full on hero now, the one person that she probably would have really loved to get advice from, like a role model, would have been Janet. Who has been out of her life for 30 years.”
“So it is interesting that now that she gets the thing she wants, to be a hero, I think it only increases this sadness and sense of loss that her mom is not there. So that prologue helps to set up that relationship that really drives Hope emotionally through the movie.”
