MARVEL STUDIOS GOT the Valentine’s Day gift it most wanted. After literal years of speculation about who could play the newest iteration of the Fantastic Four (the film was first announced way back in December 2020), the cast was finally revealed in a holiday-themed card/poster hybrid. And it’s resulted in one of best things the MCU has pulled off in a while: for the first time in a while, expectations seem to be pretty high.
Obviously it’s early days with The Fantastic Four, but just in revealing its cast, the film—which will be helmed by WandaVision director Matt Shakman—also revealed a colorful midcentury ’60s signature tone. The foursome at the film’s center will be the group that was long rumored: Mr. Franchise himself, Pedro Pascal, will lead as Reed Richards, while he’ll be joined by Mission Impossible and The Crown star Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, Stranger Things breakout Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm, and freshly-minted Emmy winner Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm.
The gut excitement for this group may first jump to the ubiquitous Pascal or the Oscar-nominated Kirby, but the masterstroke in casting is actually the decision to lock in Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing. It may seem like The Bear star is only now beginning his ascent in show business, but he’s actually shown an impressively malleability over a career that’s already spanned more than 20 years that makes him a perfect for this difficult role.
Those familiar with the Fantastic Four know the story of Ben Grimm all too well. But in case you need a refresher: like his fellow “family” members, Ben gained superpowers after a space expedition went wrong. But while his teammates’s powers—flexibility, invisibility, pyrotechnics—can be concealed, Ben’s are with him all the time. Ben Grimm can’t turn it off; once he transformed into The Thing, an almost Hulk-sized person with canyon-colored boulders where his skin used to be, that was his new life. The 2005 Fantastic Four film was hardly a masterpiece, but Michael Chiklis did a solid job in bringing the character to life; Jaime Bell is a fantastic actor (as anyone who saw 2023’s All of Us Strangers can attest), but his turn in the DOA 2015 Fantastic 4 was less successful.
In the forthcoming The Fantastic Four—now set for a July 2025 release—Bachrach could easily deliver the best version of the character we’ve seen to date. While he’s having his biggest moment in the spotlight due to the overwhelming success of The Bear, Bachrarchhas been working hard in the industry for more than 20 years, perhaps his earliest role of note coming as a bellhop in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.
In the years since, he’s made a point of never doing one thing over and over again; I first noticed him as a character named Desi—a narcissistic, obnoxious, and very funny musician boyfriend of Alison Williams’s Marnie in HBO’s Girls—before noticing his shape-shifting nature in recent projects like The Dropout (where he played intrepid real-life journalist John Carreyrou), Andor (where he played a double-crossing space scoundrel), and No Hard Feelings (where he played a dim-witted tow-truck driver who could not resist Jennifer Lawrence’s charms).
It is likely, however, that The Bear landed Bachrach the job in The Fantastic Four. In a cast filled to the brim with stars—Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, and a guest-starring Jon Bernthal just to name a few—Bachrach’s character, Richie aka “Cousin,” has the most impressive arc. At the start of the series, on the surface, Richie is a guy everyone knows: brash, annoying, kind of dumb. But over the course of the series, we learn that there’s far more than that. Richie has a daughter he cares deeply about, en ex-wife he wished he didn’t lose, and an inherent desire, despite what even he seems to think at certain points, to be better. If you want to see Bachrach’s acting ability—and one of the best TV episodes of 2023, period—on full display, check out Season 2’s “Forks,” where Richie’s surface fully gives way to his softer core.
The Thing is a character who any version of Fantastic Four needs to get right to succeed; when Jack Kirby first created Ben Grimm along with Stan Lee (in November 1961’s The Fantastic Four #1), he modeled him after himself. Fantastic Four is Marvel’s superhero story of found family, a tale that explains that every person has more going on than meets the eye. And through his roles—specifically one where he’s already shown the ability to cut to the inside of a rough exterior—Ebon Moss-Bachrach has shown that he’s more than capable of making an unenviable task look easy.
Evan Romano
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
