(Image courtesy of Marvel Studios)
Oscar winner Michael Douglas has yet to officially retire, but he has scaled back his workload considerably, taking the occasional role when the acting bug strikes. There is one long-running gig, however, that still requires him to report for duty whenever Marvel calls: playing Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man. During a recent appearance on the "Happy Sad Confused" podcast, Douglas admitted that he has wanted to leave the role behind for years—but Marvel Studios refused to let him go.
(Image courtesy of Marvel Studios)
Douglas previously revealed that he asked Marvel to kill Hank off in "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania," complete with a spectacular sendoff, but the studio turned him down. "Getting killed off was actually my request for the third one," he said. "I wanted a serious death with all these great special effects. There had to be some fantastic way for me to shrink down to the size of an ant and explode—whatever it was, I wanted to use all those effects. But that was the last one. Now, I don't think I'm going to show up for a fourth."
This time, Douglas was even more candid about how long he had wanted out. "I would have been killed off after the second one, but they wouldn't let me," he said. The actor also revealed that his initial interest in joining Marvel largely came down to curiosity about effects-heavy filmmaking. "I said, 'I've never done a green-screen movie,' so I told all my agents, 'I'd like to do one of these green-screen movies and see what they're like.' It's amazing. There's nothing there, just a green screen, and then they show you what it will look like once all the effects are finished. But acting that way is hard. It's very complicated, with things coming at you from every direction. We did 'Ant-Man,' and Paul Rudd was a wonderful actor. It was a lovely group—but once you're in, you can't get out."