Even cosmic beings need air conditioning: Ralph Ineson on getting suited up as Galactus in The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Ralph Ineson has been an exemplary actor for decades, and he’s finally getting the cosmic-sized role he deserves with Galactus in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Many people, including myself, assumed that Galactus would be a motion-capture creation, but director Matt Shakman wanted his team to build a full set of armour for Ineson to wear.
While speaking with THR, Ineson said he had assumed from the beginning that he would be wearing a suit, not realizing how unlikely that typically would have been. “I knew that superheroes wear superhero suits, so I immediately assumed it would be practical, not realizing what a naive thought that was. I didn’t realize how rare it is to try and do something on the scale of Galactus in a practical way,” he said. “But from when I first met Matt, he spoke about it as if they were going to build a suit for me to play the character practically. It’s a great gift for an actor to be able to do that, and whilst I also did some motion capture work, the majority of my stuff was practical and in costume. So you really feel the part when you’ve got that kit on yourself.“
Getting suited up as the Devourer of Worlds was no small feat. “Well, it wasn’t that the costume was so uncomfortable; it was more the fact that I’m 55 years old,” he said. “My joints are falling apart, and that costume made my knees flare up from carrying the extra weight, so I occasionally had to get a massage at lunchtime. I was incredibly well looked after.“
He compared his Galactus team to a Formula One pit crew, with everyone working to keep him cooled down. “The way you have to shoot Galactus is as a miniature, and then you blow up the footage. It stays in perfect focus once it’s expanded because we had excess bright white light on set,” he said. “So wearing the huge suit and the helmet and the gauntlets and all the gear whilst filming in that bright white light was extremely hot, and my pit crew had a whole routine so that I could stay cool enough. Galactus can’t sweat, so I had to keep my body temperature down, but also do these quite physical things under the bright light.“
He continued, “I’d do a couple of takes and sit down whilst they were resetting the camera, and I’d have one person on each gauntlet and another person on the helmet. Somebody would then put an air conditioning unit up the back of my armor, and people with fans were in front of me. We’d all watch for the assistant director to give the 30-second countdown before everybody had to put everything back on me. So it was exactly like a pit stop for a Formula One car.“
Our own Chris Bumbray said that The Fantastic Four: First Steps surprised him. “I’ve been burned out on both Marvel and superhero films in general, but this one got me to care again,” he wrote, adding that creatively, “it’s the best Marvel movie in a long time.” You can check out the rest of his review right here. The film will hit theaters on July 25.
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