49 Fun Facts About The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Who plays Reed Richards in The Fantastic Four: First Steps?

Pedro Pascal. He worked up a clipped Mid-Atlantic accent to suit the period setting, but Marvel kept pulling him back towards his own natural voice.

Who plays Sue Storm in The Fantastic Four: First Steps?

Vanessa Kirby. She says she is itching to play Malice, the dark alter ego Sue takes on in the comics, and wanted this Sue to be more than a sweet, perfect mother.

Which star of The Bear plays Ben Grimm / The Thing?

Ebon Moss-Bachrach. He plays the Thing through motion capture, and says a text from Mark Ruffalo, Marvel's Hulk, took the mystery out of it: just treat it like normal scene work.

Who plays Johnny Storm in The Fantastic Four: First Steps?

Joseph Quinn. Best known as Eddie Munson in Stranger Things, he inherits a part once played by Chris Evans and Michael B. Jordan, both of whom went on to bigger Marvel roles.

Who directed The Fantastic Four: First Steps?

Matt Shakman. He took over in 2022 after Jon Watts, the director of Marvel's Spider-Man films, stepped away, and brought much of his WandaVision crew with him.

The world of First Steps is designed in which style?

Retro-futurism. The designers pictured tomorrow as the 1960s imagined it, working from the Space Race and even from the original blueprints of the Apollo rockets.

Earth-828 in First Steps is numbered for which comics legend's birthday?

Jack Kirby. The artist who co-created the team was born on August 28, 1917; the film closes on a quotation from him, after which the number 828 turns into his dates.

As First Steps opens in 1964, the world is celebrating four years since what?

The team gained their powers. Rather than stage the accident again, the film recaps it in a television tribute presented by the talk-show host Ted Gilbert.

What philanthropic organisation set up by Sue has brought the world demilitarisation and peace?

The Future Foundation. In the comics it is Reed's creation; the film hands it to Sue, who has used it to talk the world's nations into laying down their arms.

In the backstory of First Steps, what gave the four astronauts their powers during a space mission?

Cosmic rays. The accident happens off screen: the film opens with the four already world-famous, a way of sparing audiences an origin story they had seen filmed before.

Who plays the Silver Surfer in The Fantastic Four: First Steps?

Julia Garner. The Surfer's gleaming body is all motion capture, but Garner still took surfing lessons before filming so that she would move like someone used to a board.

What is the name of the Silver Surfer's home planet?

Zenn-La. The Surfer became Galactus's herald so that he would spare her own world, and has paid for it ever since by leading him to other planets to devour.

Who plays Galactus in The Fantastic Four: First Steps?

Ralph Ineson. The planet-eater was not his first Marvel job: he had a blink-and-miss small part as a Ravager pilot in Guardians of the Galaxy back in 2014.

What does Galactus demand in exchange for sparing Earth?

Reed and Sue's unborn child. Galactus senses in the baby a power great enough to take over his endless hunger and so set him free of it.

What is the name of Reed and Sue's son?

Franklin. He is born in space on the flight home, after Galactus brings on Sue's labour; none of the earlier Fantastic Four films had given the couple a child at all.

What celestial object helps the team escape the Silver Surfer on the flight home?

A neutron star. The team dives into its pull to shake off the pursuing Surfer and uses the same gravity to sling the ship back towards Earth, just as Sue goes into labour.

What is Reed's plan for saving Earth from Galactus?

Teleport Earth to another solar system. The plan needs giant bridges built in cities around the globe and all the world's power to run them, which is where Sue's diplomacy comes in.

Where is Galactus lured for the team's last stand in First Steps?

Times Square. The crew built it as a vast outdoor set at about four-fifths of full size, with a giant tube television standing where today's screens would be.

How does Johnny finally get through to the Silver Surfer?

By learning her language. He decodes it from old space transmissions, then confronts her with the last messages of worlds she helped destroy, and she flees in remorse.

Who is Harvey Elder, played by Paul Walter Hauser?

Mole Man, ruler of Subterranea. Once the team's enemy, he makes a truce with Sue and shelters the people of New York in his underground realm when Galactus arrives.

Who finally pushes Galactus through the portal in First Steps?

Shalla-Bal. Johnny is about to sacrifice himself when the Surfer stops him, rams Galactus through the portal herself and vanishes with him as it closes.

What happens to Sue after she holds Galactus back with all her power?

She dies and her baby revives her. Reed cannot bring her back, but the newborn can, the first real sign of the power that Galactus sensed in him.

In the mid-credits scene of First Steps, who is the man in the green cloak holding a metal mask?

Doctor Doom. Robert Downey Jr. plays him with his face kept out of shot, in a scene filmed during the making of the next Avengers film.

What is the name of the Fantastic Four's robot assistant?

H.E.R.B.I.E. Short for Humanoid Experimental Robot B-Type Integrated Electronics, he was a real puppet on set, and proved three times harder to build than the team's flying car.

What is the Fantastic Four's spaceship called?

The Excelsior. The name is Stan Lee's famous sign-off, the film's salute to the writer who co-created the Fantastic Four in 1961.

The team's rocket launch pad juts out from the Baxter Building over which New York waterway?

The East River. To launch a rocket from midtown Manhattan without chaos, the designers imagined curtains of steam drawn up from the water to smother the flames.

Which Stanley Kubrick film inspired the look of Reed's three-room lab?

2001: A Space Odyssey. The director wanted the whole film to feel as if Kubrick had made it in 1965, so the crew built real sets and model spaceships rather than leaning on green screen.

Who plays talk show host Ted Gilbert in The Fantastic Four: First Steps?

Mark Gatiss. He says the director simply offered him the part, a rarity at a studio where, as he put it, almost everyone has to audition.

Who plays Rachel Rozman, the schoolteacher who catches Ben Grimm's eye in First Steps?

Natasha Lyonne. Her schoolteacher is an original character: in the comics Ben's usual love interest is the blind sculptor Alicia Masters.

Which actor's role as Red Ghost was cut entirely from First Steps?

John Malkovich. His scenes sat in an early montage of the team's first battles; the director, who had worked with him before, called leaving them out heartbreaking.

Cast members from which earlier Fantastic Four project make cameos as journalists and civilians?

Alex Hyde-White, Rebecca Staab, Jay Underwood and Michael Bailey Smith all appear.

The two comic-book makers glimpsed at their desks as the Surfer arrives work for which company, Marvel's original name?

Timely. The credits call the pair only Timely employees, but they are widely read as stand-ins for the two men who created the Fantastic Four.

Which video game did Kevin Feige show the crew as a guide to how Galactus should look?

Fortnite. Feige screened footage of the game's Marvel crossover event, in which Galactus appears as the towering, helmeted giant of the comics.

When the world's nations gather early in First Steps, which country's seat is conspicuously empty?

Latveria. A nameplate marks the place but nobody sits behind it, a quiet hint at the masked ruler who turns up once the credits roll.

Who composed the score for First Steps?

Michael Giacchino. He is a Marvel director as well as a Marvel composer: he made the 2022 special Werewolf by Night, and wrote the fanfare that plays over the studio's logo.

First Steps opened which era of the MCU?

Phase Six. Kevin Feige named it as the phase's opening film back in 2022, and it kept that place even though its release date then slipped three times.

In First Steps, what is Johnny Storm's superhero name?

The Human Torch. The name is older than the team: Marvel's first Human Torch, created in 1939, was an android, and Johnny was written in 1961 as a reinvention of him.

Marvel Studios regained the Fantastic Four film rights when Disney bought which studio in 2019?

20th Century Fox. Fox had made three Fantastic Four films and was planning more when the takeover put its Marvel projects on hold and passed the team to Kevin Feige.

The Ted Gilbert Show in First Steps is modelled on the programme of which real 1960s host?

Ed Sullivan. The film's first trailer even ends with the team on a stage ringed by giant arrows, much like the set on which the Beatles first played live on American television, on his show in February 1964.

Which two actors reportedly turned down Reed and Sue after pay talks with Marvel fell through?

Adam Driver and Emma Stone. Both are reported to have passed after Marvel declined to meet the salaries they asked for, at a time when the studio was said to be reining in its spending on stars.

Where was most of First Steps filmed between July and November 2024?

Pinewood Studios, England. Most of the film's 1960s New York was built there, on 30 sets spread across eight sound stages and two backlots.

What plays in the final post-credits scene of First Steps?

A Fantastic Four cartoon's titles. The hand-drawn sequence comes from a show within the film's world, and gives Red Ghost, cut from the live action, a cameo in animated form.

Which street on the Lower East Side is Ben Grimm's old neighbourhood in First Steps?

Yancy Street. The comics' invention is a riff on the real Delancey Street, and the set was a hand-me-down: it had already served in Deadpool & Wolverine before being redressed.

The villain Red Ghost, cut from First Steps, leads a gang of super-powered what?

Apes. In the comics he takes three of them into space to copy the accident that made the Fantastic Four, and one, an orangutan, still tangles with Reed in the film's opening montage.

The opening montage of First Steps restages the cover of the first Fantastic Four comic, where the team fights which monster?

Giganto. The green giant bursting up through a city street is sent from underground by the villain of that first issue, and the film copies the 1961 cover almost exactly.

In the comics, which character is the original Silver Surfer, a role First Steps recasts as a woman?

Norrin Radd. In the comics he is the one who offers himself to Galactus to save his planet, leaving his lover behind; the film gives that sacrifice to her instead.

Marvel launched the first teaser for First Steps at a space museum in which Alabama city?

Huntsville. The four leads counted the trailer down in front of a Saturn V rocket at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, the home of Space Camp.

What was unusual about how the First Steps premiere reached fans?

It was live-streamed on Disney+. No premiere had been streamed live on the service before; subscribers saw the carpet arrivals and a sneak peek, though not the film itself.

When First Steps moved to July 2025, it swapped release dates with which other Marvel film?

Thunderbolts*. The swap gave that film the May slot, and its post-credits scene returned the favour by showing the Fantastic Four's rocket arriving from another universe.