Buena Vista(LOS ANGELES) — Actor Corey Stoll has appeared in movies like Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, as well as The Bourne Legacy, and on TV shows including The Strain and Homeland, but he gets his chance to shine in theaters Friday as a very bad bad guy in Marvel’s Ant-Man.
Stoll plays Darren Cross, a slippery scientist and former protege of Michael Douglas’ Dr. Hank Pym, who is hell-bent on recreating the size-shifting technology Pym created decades ago. While Pym used his revolutionary Pym Particles for good as the hero Ant-Man, and will stop at nothing to keep the power hidden, Cross schemes to sell the potentially world-changing technology to the highest bidder.
Being bad, Stoll tells ABC News Radio, was always part of his plan. “A while ago I’d had sort of a general meeting with Marvel…And…I came in very definitively saying I want to be a villain. It just seems so like so much fun all the way back to Gene Hackman playing Lex Luthor, all those guys, they’re having the most fun in all those movies.”
To stop Cross, Pym taps Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang, an ex-con electrical engineer and cat burglar, to take on the Ant-Man mantle after he unwittingly steals Pym’s old super suit.
While Rudd trained to get into fighting shape to fill out the red and black number — and pull off a very ripped shirtless scene — Cross’ competing Yellowjacket suit was entirely computer generated. That means technically, Stoll didn’t have to fit into anything, except the very unflattering unitard used behind-the-scenes to motion-capture his performance — and that was enough motivation to hit the gym, he tells ABC News: “Just for the behind-the-scenes footage, when they saw me in the unitard, I wanted to be in good shape. So that is what I worked out for in the end.”
While his on-set outfit looked silly, Stoll said his on-screen suit is anything but. “You just have to keep holding onto the notion that you got the best special effects team in the world. They’ve got your back and you’re not going to look like an idiot when it all cuts together, but,” he allows, “you have to keep reminding yourself that. ”
Ant-Man, which also stars Michael Pena, Evangeline Lilly, Judy Greer, Anthony Mackey, Hayley Atwell, and John Slattery, opens nationwide Friday.
Marvel is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC News.
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