Oppenheimer and The Santa Clause franchise actor David Krumholtz revealed how he lobbied to play Ben Grimm/The Thing in Marvel Studios‘ The Fantastic Four reboot.
“It’s been a big, sort of unabashedly craven goal of mine to be part of the MCU in some way,” Krumholtz said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly while promoting his new movie Lousy Carter. “I met [director] Matt Shakman for Ben Grimm. I only met him on the strength of a Twitter post or an Instagram post that I then took down two hours after I posted it. I was embarrassed. My post said, ‘I just want to be in the conversation.’ And it was a picture of the Thing, and Matt saw it somehow.”
Krumholtz added, “And I had a meeting with him and we discussed it. And I’ve never been so bold in a meeting before, just begging for the role, just straight up selling the s— out of it, the idea of how committed and passionate I was for it. But obviously that didn’t happen.”
A lifelong Marvel Comics fan since age eleven, Krumholtz eventually lost out to The Bear star Ebon Moss-Bachrach who the actor believes “makes more sense” as Ben Grimm. With Moss-Bachrach joining Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, and Joseph Quinn as Marvel’s First Family, that leaves the movie’s main antagonist still a mystery.
What supervillain does David Krumholtz want to play in the MCU?
Though Marvel has yet to confirm Fantastic Four’s supervillain, Krumholtz is already angling on the team’s first nemesis the Mole Man who was introduced in Fantastic Four #1 in 1961. “It’s not a joke at all,” Krumholtz said. “I mean, it’s a shoe-in for Mole Man, isn’t it? But I don’t know. I’ll do anything Marvel tells me to. I’ll probably end up playing like a superhero’s therapist. Let’s face it. There’s slim pickings for guys like me in that world, unfortunately. I’m old and I’m not in any kind of acceptable shape. So we’ll see how that works out, if it works out at all.”
Directed by Matt Shakman from a screenplay by Josh Friedman, The Fantastic Four is scheduled for release on July 25, 2025.
