Evangeline Lilly On Girl Power and Equality During Ant-Man and The Wasp – #Antmanandthewaspevent

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I had such a pleasure interviewing Evangeline Lilly  as “Hope van Dyne / The Wasp” from Ant-Man and The Wasp during my press trip in LA last month. Where we view a screening of The Ant-Man and The Wasp and had interviews with select cast members, including Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Hannah John-Kamen and Laurence Fishburne

 

(Disney invited me on a hosted press trip in exchange for coverage for the Ant-Man and The Wasp, as always, thoughts and opinion are my own)

 

I sure enjoyed the interview with Evangeline Lilly, she had such a refreshing perspective on how the world and the movie industry are transforming. In a time where it is all about girl power and woman’s rights, she is not swinging 100% to the left, she is very neutral and gives credit to all as a team. She made this very clear after our first statement.

You did all of the heavy lifting on the action in this.

“Well, I didn’t lift a semi truck.  That was Mister Rudd.  And, actually, me and my team of incredible stunt women, the CGI crew, the directors, I mean, it was such a collaborative effort.  We did the heavy lifting.  But, yeah.  This film, like, almost in a way, I was like, “Come on, guys, give Ant Man a little more credit, he’s pretty bad-ass.”  But, it was really cool, that they really wanted to honor this moment where a female superhero is being titled and billed, and I think Marvel is just absolutely hell bent and passionate right now about representing women as fierce and capable and as equals to men. 

And I think that’s the most important thing is like, is there equality to the message?   And I think that having equal billing tells us that right now, in this movie, there is.”

We wanted to dig in a little more and ask her what it was like to be a superhero and be the first woman to be titled and billed with Marvel. Many of us have little girls and know that they will be looking up to her as a powerful role-model for guidance for them to dream big and understand equality.

Talk to us about being a superhero

“Amazing, amazing.  I used to fantasize about being Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman. I was obsessed with her.  And partly because it’s Michelle Pfeiffer in a skin-tight leather costume, owning it, and being fierce as shit.  But, also, I think it was because there wasn’t a lot to choose from, you know.  There just weren’t very many female superheroes.  It was mostly male superheroes. 

So, me and my sisters would sometimes be pretending to be Spiderman or be Batman or be whoever else.  And, you know, I had a moment recently where my seven-year old son was pretending to be The Wasp. I still get goose bumps when I tell that story.  It makes me — it chokes me up, because that’s a cultural shift. You know, for a little boy to pretend to be a female superhero, that’s like, this is no small thing. 

And sometimes, I think we’re making a mountain of a molehill, because there have been female superheroes in the MCU the whole time, and they’re amazing, and they’re strong, and kickass, and all of those things.  But I think what this moment in our culture, with #MeToo and #TimesUp is saying.  We know we’ve made some progress, and that’s great, but we’re still not equal, and that’s clear by the fact that you’ve made 20 movies, and never had a female in the title.  So, this is a big moment, and it is a big deal, and I don’t want to downplay it. I want to celebrate it and be excited about it.”

Image credit: Warner Bros.

I think everyone in the room could relate to her obsession in one way or another with Michelle Pfeiffer, So now that she had the opportunity to work with her childhood idol.. we couldn’t help but ask her….  how did it feel in working with Michelle Pfeiffer after daydreaming of this moment.

How did it feel in working with Michelle Pfeiffer

“I know!  I was like, if anyone in the world says that I can pass as her daughter, I’m going to kiss them forever.  I’m like, what? Oh, it was a dream, to work with Michelle.  Because the weird thing is, an actor, and maybe you guys experience this as journalists now and meeting actors, is that you can be obsessed with someone on the screen, and then you meet them, and they just destroy it for you.  And you’re just like, “I wish I’d never met you.” 

“I want you to be perfect, you know?”  And that’s impossible.  Who can live up to that?  Michelle can.  She can.  She’s perfect, like, there’s no flaws.  She’s nice.  She’s generous.  She’s smart.  She’s funny.  She’s intelligent.  She’s considerate.  She’s talented, and of course, she is the hottest sixty-something or however old she is you’re ever gonna meet.  And so playing her daughter was an incredible honor, and also, I had to just bite my tongue, ’cause every day, I wanted to just be like, “Can you be my mentor?”

 

“And then working with Michael Douglas has — I was so astounded by him in the first film, because I was the opposite with him.  I was kind of ignorant to him.  Like I watched him in Romancing the Stone, and was like, “Cool.  Great romance.  He’s cute.”  I was eight, y’know, or whatever I was, but I didn’t keep up with his career.  I just knew he was a big movie star.  But I wasn’t a Michael Douglas of like, somebody who’d watched all of his movies, and knew his work.”

“So, when I took the job, I was like, “Great, Michael Douglas, big name, gonna help the film.  It’s gonna help our numbers.”  And then I started working with him and was like, “Oh.  Whoa.”  He’s so good.  He’s such a charismatic, present, powerful human being that when he starts to perform, he just changes the molecules of the room.  You’re suddenly transported to the place you’re pretending to be, and so when I read the script for the second film, and I found out that I was going to get an enormous amount of work with him, and that we would be like, super close and super…tactile and loving and like, we were partners after the really difficult journey that we went through in the first film?”

“we are strong because of our femininity, not in spite of it”

We hopped back on the topic of women and Marvel, we asked if she ever thinks that there will be an  all female superhero movie in the MCU? She laughed and replied back with “There’s only like, six of us. I mean, how many are there, really?  I think it has to be all of us.” We followed up with, a movie featuring both Superheroes and Villains?

“I mean, here’s the thing.  I want all of the women in the MCU in a movie together. All of that’s just rumor and gossip.  None of that comes from a real place, but I’m just gonna keep perpetuating the rumor, because then maybe it’ll really happy.  Because Marvel love their fans, and really listen to them.”

 In the Marvel Universe.  Especially with the women.  Yours in the van was just so beautiful, absolutely stunning.  Talk about the training that went behind that?

“When I went to the Avengers premiere, you could not shut me up“, and one point when-Scarlet Witch was trapped alone by the female villain Proxima, she said “He will die alone, as will you” “But she’s not alone.”  as Black Widow and  Okoye come by her side and rescue her “Literally, in the theater at the premiere in my gown, I go, “F*** yeah!”

 

“Yes.  I couldn’t help myself. So,  That van scene.  I love that you pointed out the van scene, because the restaurant scene is the one that everyone talks about, because it’s the big kind of spectacle fight in the movie. “

“I actually spent way less time worrying about getting my body rock hard and developing, visual muscles as I spent in front of a mirror with my stunt doubles, making sure that we didn’t just take a dude, and put him in a woman’s body.  I didn’t want to send the message that in order to be powerful, strong, capable and tough, you have to be masculine, macho, and a dude.”

“I wanted to show that we are strong because of our femininity, not in spite of it.  I wanted to show that, when Hope was emotional, vulnerable, smiling, pleasant and happy she was not, just a badass bitch, you know.   I wanted to show that when she was fighting, it was by incorporating grace and elegance and femininity into the fight, and I feel like, in the van, that out the window and back, I mean, it’s ballet.”

“It’s ballet.  Like no dude could do that, ’cause men can’t move that way, because they don’t have the flexibility, agility or the petiteness to come out a back window and in a front window.  They just couldn’t.  And that’s, like, let’s examine how a woman could have an advantage over a man, physically, because she’s a woman.  Not because she figured out how to move like a man.”

“I can’t wait to see a feminine, male superhero.”

 

Ant-Man and The Wasp in Theaters July 6th