[Video] Jonathan Majors Reveals The Songs He Played On Set To Get In The Mood To Play Kang The Conqueror In Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania

8days.sg last spoke to Jonathan Majors almost three years ago. It was at the height of the pandemic and he was sequestered in an apartment in Santa Fe, New Mexico, fielding queries from the press about his soon-to-be-out Lovecraft Country, the HBO sci-fi horror series produced by JJ Abrams and Jordan Peele (neither he met on the set, oddly enough).

The Californian-born, Texas-raised actor’s other film, Da 5 Bloods, Spike Lee’s Vietnam War picture, featuring the late Chadwick Boseman, had just dropped on Netflix, and he was a few weeks away from resuming work on the Jay-Z-produced Western The Harder They Fall. A month after our interview came the big announcement: Marvel Studios has cast him as one of the lead roles in the upcoming Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania opposite Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly.

That part turned out to be Kang the Conqueror, the time-travelling, multiversal traversing tyrant who’ll be wreaking havoc and spreading pandemonium in the Marvel Cinematic Universe from Phase 5 on. Fans didn’t have to wait too long for Kang to pop his MCU cherry: the cape-wearing mofo appeared in the season finale of Loki, the Disney+ series starring Tom Hiddleston as the God of Mischief, but he was playing a variant of Kang (and he has an infinite number of them), who went by He Who Remains.

Flash forward to the present. 8days.sg is chatting with Majors again, over Zoom again, this time from Los Angeles, about Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. This writer remembers Majors being thoughtful and playful with his answers back in 2020, but today, he’s all business, direct, and very serious. And he’s probably exhausted from the promo blitz, with more lined up for next month’s Creed III, where he gets into the ring with MCU alum Michael B Jordan. Or maybe he’s still in character.

“Jonathan brought an entirely different energy to the set,” said Quantumania director Peyton Reed, in the production notes. “The Ant- Man movies have always been comedies. I like to have a really relaxed, fun set so that the actors can go in front of the camera and feel comfortable trying weird stuff. It’s a safe space. And Jonathan came in as this disruptor — this very intimidating force.

“He carried music with him when he showed up on the set — we knew Kang the Conqueror was there. It was so great to put that energy up against Paul Rudd’s energy, and it mirrored what we were doing in the movie itself.”

One wonders how did Majors prepare to play Kang: Did he employ the same method as he did with his other roles — by engaging a topeng handicraftsman to build masks to represent his characters and he would then channel taksu through these masks?

That is one of the questions I throw at Majors in our four-minute interview. That, and what were the songs on his playlist that helped set the tone of the Quantumania set?

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is now in cinemas; Creed III opens on Mar 2.

Photos: Disney, TPG News/Click Photos,

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