Michael Douglas is 78 years old, maintains the appearance of his best times and wants to work: the protagonist of Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction opens today in theaters Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the third installment of the Marvel superhero saga dedicated to to the ant man And he’s in favor of making the fourth one… as long as they kill off his character, the scientist Hank Pym, who discovered a way to shrink and grow at will and is obsessed with the world of ants. . Together with his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer), his daughter (Evangelina Lilly, the superhero Wasp) and his brother-in-law (Paul Rudd, Ant-Man) they will end up dragged into the quantum world, where an evil awaits them, Kang, who like other rulers today sees the broken world and wants to make it new… in his own way.
Accustomed to R-rated movies – unaccompanied minors – the move to superhero films, he says, “is very nice: I am welcomed by the family instead of being scared.” But also, he adds, “I had never shot green screen, special effects films, and I was curious how different it would be to act in them. You depend much more on the director because when acting, many things that the viewer sees later are not there. The director tells you, ‘you have to be scared here’, and you think you are overreacting. But when you see the movie, he was right most of the time.”
Douglas attributes the superhero movie boom to “clearly we need escapism” but adds that “without them I don’t know how many theaters we would have today.” And escapist or not, in the new installment of Ant-Man, in that quantum world where the characters arrive, words like socialism and technocracy are pronounced. And there is a dictatorship whose villain, Kang, says that conquerors take broken worlds and build a new one. Does he look like Putin? “It was not the intention of the film, but yes, and taking the analogy to the end, this is the beginning of phase 5 of the Marvel universe and in it Kang is going to be the villain of all future Marvel movies, so Putin He’s going to be the evil emperor for the whole world.” A world, not the quantum one, but ours, of which the actor says that “the only thing I hope is that this terrible war unites us in realizing how small it is. And we don’t know of any other. Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, but this is what it is. Maybe we should worry about global food supplies, about the weather. Maybe we can have a better understanding of the entire planet and take more care of people with fewer advantages.”
Looking back at his career, he says, the films that make him smile “are the offbeat ones, like One Day of the Fury, War of the Roses, Star Wars, unpredictable films, with black humor within but mixed with pathos, with tragedy. They are the ones that have interested me the most.” But he is not nostalgic and he likes the new Hollywood. “The biggest change has been the move from celluloid to the digital world. It allows the actors to work faster and repeat. Of course, with digital the community has disintegrated. In my father’s generation and when I started, everything was concentrated around Hollywood, you didn’t live far. Much of the work was done in or around the studios. Now there are studies all over the world and because of digital you don’t need laboratories. People are everywhere and there are many more Zoom calls – he smiles and refers to the interview – than personal meetings ”.
