Marvel Studios officially announced the cast of The Fantastic Four earlier this month on Valentine's Day, with The Bear and The Punisher actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach set to take on the role of ben Grimm/The Thing.
Other actors had been rumored for the part in the buildup to the big reveal, but one name that didn't come up was Oppenheimer standout David Krumholtz.
While chatting to EW, Krumholtz revealed that his social media campaign to play The Thing paid off, and he managed to get a meeting with The Fantastic Four director Matt Shakman.
“It's been a big, sort of unabashedly craven goal of mine to be part of the MCU in some way. I met [director] Matt Shakman for Ben Grimm,” he tells the site. "I only met him on the strength of a Twitter post or an Instagram post that I then took down two hours after I posted it,” he says. “I was embarrassed. My post said, ‘I just want to be in the conversation.’ And it was a picture of the Thing, and Matt saw it somehow. And I had a meeting with him and we discussed it. And I've never been so bold in a meeting before, just begging for the role, just straight up selling the s--- out of it, the idea of how committed and passionate I was for it. But obviously that didn't happen.”
Now, Krumholtz appears to have set his sights on another FF villain: Mole Man!
“It’s not a joke at all,” the actor says of his recent social media post (see below). “I mean, it's a shoe-in for Mole Man, isn't it? But I don't know. I'll do anything Marvel tells me to. I'll probably end up playing like a superhero's therapist. Let's face it. There's slim pickings for guys like me in that world, unfortunately. I'm old and I'm not in any kind of acceptable shape. So we'll see how that works out, if it works out at all.”
Joining Moss-Bachrach will be Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us, Game of Thrones) as Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby (Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning) as Sue Storm, aka the Invisible Woman, and Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things) as Johnny Storm, aka the Human Torch.
The Fantastic Four is set to hit theaters on July 25, 2025.