Disclosure: I received an all expense paid trip to Los Angeles California for the #AntManEvent press Junket. All opinions are my own and were not swayed by any outside sources!
Every action movie has to have a bad guy or a villain. It’s what makes the plot exciting and what keeps the audience on the edge of their seat. While this bad guy or villain isn’t always the popular guy in town, he’s still an important part of the movie. He also needs to have a good, strong actor behind him, if he wants to be effective. You’d think that the person who plays the villain drew the short straw. But that is not the case for Corey Stoll who plays Darren Cross a.k.a. “Yellow Jacket” in Ant-Man. “I had a general meeting with the Executives at Marvel years ago.” says Corey Stoll “That was the first thing I said: I want to play a Villain.”
And so it happened!
So how was it for Corey, to get his wish and play a villain?
“It was not hard at all. My first day of shooting was sort of a microcosm of what the whole shoot would be: where in the morning we did motion capture, totally abstract, just stunts and you know, it was like being in a silent film where you run this way and then duck and then pick up a toy train and throw it and it was just, you know, pure play. That was really fun and then the afternoon there was a very quiet scene with Michael Douglas where I show up at his house unannounced and it’s our really most sort of intense scene.
It was just such a great way to start because there are these two extremes of what this role would be. It was just fun. I think as we went on, there was a lot of work with Peyton trying to calibrate. I want to make sure this character is scary but I also love what a Loser he was. He’s the least cool guy in the World. He wants to be Tony Stark. He wants to be the coolest guy in the world. He’s puffing himself up with these Tom Ford Suits and driving an Aston Martin… but he knows that he’s not that guy. That’s the irony, he’s trying to buff himself up in the end to impress this father figure and it’s exactly the opposite of what a father figure wants. I mean I think the script was really smart about giving very real, playable motivations.”
Since Corey knew he wanted to be in a Marvel film and play a Villian, does this mean he was a comic book fan before becoming Yellow Jacket? “I was really into Comic Books, starting with the real Super Hero Marvel Comic Books and then getting into some sort of darker stuff but, I mean Spiderman, X-Men and all that stuff.” Corey told us.
Corey told us that Spiderman was his favorite comic as a kid because he could relate to him a bit, being from New York and growing up in Queens. He told us “You know, he really bounced around but I would definitely say this about Spiderman. He was just the guy that I think that as a High School Student that you could identify with the most. Um, and just, then also just the New Yorkness. You know, I never really, you know, I liked Batman and I mean, and Superman but they were all in these sort of fictional Cities and uh, Spiderman was New York. You know, as a kid from Queens, the idea, you know, that fantasy of being able to swing through the buildings that I see every day was really cool.
Not all villains start out evil or are evil to the core. Some of them are just “stuck” and all they know to do is to be bad. But even villains can sometimes have good qualities about them. Corey saw a little bit of good in Darren when it came to the technology and the suit and what it really could do for the world, in terms of good things. “You know, when he is first selling the Yellow Jacket and this technology, we sort of brainstormed about what would be the beneficial applications of this technology and you realize that this actually could save the world. You know, there’s so many things you could do: you could ship — you could get a shipping container down to the side of a Volkswagen Bug, you know, and shipping cost would be like nothing.” Corey said.
He went on to say “Carbon emissions could become a smaller, or you could maybe like shrink smoke as it comes out of a coal powered planet or you could shrink down a surgeon and do micro-surgery. It really is like this incredibly utopian thing. I think there is that element in Darrin that’s like he wants to change the world for the better. It’s just that this military application has to be the most lucrative, you know?”
“He just made the wrong choice. Having Michael Douglas be the person playing the father figure, that was very easy to sort of identify with wanting to get this approval. And as a younger actor, I would like his approval.”
As for the suit that Yellow Jacket wears? We asked Corey to tell us about the suit. Paul Rudd share how exciting it was to first wear the suit so we wanted to know what Corey felt like when he wore it. “I did two separate trips down to Atlanta just to try on different versions of the suit and it just never looked right. And I remember the first time I tried it on, everybody was trying to convince themselves that it looked cool. It’s gonna be great, just a little computer generated imagery here and there, it’s going to look great. And in the end, I just felt like a Power Ranger. So and luckily, you know, smarter heads prevailed and they just did it with computer generated imagery instead.”
Corey doesn’t wear the Yellow Jacket suit! After seeing the movie, I was pretty surprised that he wasn’t in the suit because it really seemed like he was! I’m continually amazed at what they can do with computers in movies. What does Corey think about how it turned out? “I think it’s awesome. I’m so excited about the way it works. I was there, I know I wasn’t wearing something but you look at it, it really looks real. It’s really amazing.”
Corey was kind enough to take a group photo with us before he left.
Ant-Man is in theaters July, 17, 2015. Make plans to go see it that night. It’s great and Marvel fans are going to love it!
I have so much more to share from my trip to LA for the Ant-Man press junket. Follow me along on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram with #AntManEvent and on the following social media channels:
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