Ebon Moss-Bachrach is one of those actors who are in so many projects, you might forget where you’ve seen them before. Obviously, he’s one of the stars of The Bear, and he played Ben Grimm/The Thing in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. But he was also in the first season of Andor, so he has Star Wars cred—and he was a Marvel actor even before Fantastic Four, appearing with his future Bear co-star Jon Bernthal in the 2017 first season of Netflix’s The Punisher.
With his Fantastic Four role, Moss-Bachrach is slated to return in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. At this point he’s a two-time Emmy winner, and he just made his Broadway debut—in other words, he’s a busy guy who doesn’t seem like an actor who’d welcome being locked into a multi-film franchise. But in a new interview, he talked about why the Thing provided the ideal way for him to do just that.
On Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Moss-Bachrach revealed he didn’t have to audition for the part—he got the offer outright. Asked if there was any hesitation to accept, he was reflective.
“I’m not the kind of person who’s just been dying to be a superhero or anything like that,” he said. “So I really weighed it.”
But he had a good reason for signing on. “For me, a huge attraction to it was that I was going to be playing a motion-capture character, or performance capture, and that was going to be very much me. But to so many fans, unless they’re real Marvel heads, they don’t connect me with the orange guy. So I found a lot of freedom in that, freedom to play, and it felt like it could be experimental, almost, in a way … really push my physicality as an actor. To me, it seemed like, speaking for me personally, the best way to be a part of this universe.”
After he decided to do the part, Moss-Bachrach added, he did speak to Andy Serkis and Mark Ruffalo for their take on the motion-capture acting experience. “It was like I was entering into this small club of capture performers and they both were very strong about saying, ‘This is not really different than the other stuff.’”
Being present on set was key, he added. “I was there every day, and there’s versions of making a movie like that, where you just go into the little black box and do all your capture stuff, and I know sometimes people do it like that.”
For Moss-Bachrach, though, “I was so grateful to be there and have that experience. And also it was really cool because I’m in my suit, but for [the other Fantastic Four characters] Reed and Sue and Johnny, when they look at the Thing, they see Ben Grimm. They’re looking at me, they’re seeing Ebon. And I think that was helpful for everybody.”
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
