The role that brought Michael Douglas closest to immortality
In recent years, it’s become common to hear the elder statesmen and women of Hollywood railing against the modern prevalence of special effects blockbusters. However, while it can’t be argued that the scales in the industry have tipped too far toward these big-ticket movies at the expense of others, it also can’t be denied that some actors have used them to their advantage brilliantly. Michael Douglas, for example, reckons his role as part of the biggest franchise in modern movies has granted him a certain kind of cinematic immortality.
In January 2014, it was announced that Douglas had signed up to play Hank Pym in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s 12th film Ant-Man. The move surprised fans and critics alike because throughout his career, Douglas had generally avoided making blockbusters and family movies. Interestingly, though, Douglas admitted to Reuters that this was precisely why he had finally decided to take the plunge into a world of superheroes, supervillains, and bizarre technology capable of shrinking people down to the size of ants.
“I’ve been dying to do a Marvel picture for so long,” Douglas revealed. “The script is really fun, the director is really good. Dylan will love it. He’ll have a picture he can see.”
Therein lay the rub. Douglas wanted his then-13-year-old son to finally have a film he could actually watch his dad in. He had cast his mind back across his long, illustrious career and saw incredible films like Wall Street, Romancing the Stone, Fatal Attraction, The Game, and Falling Down. These were all highly acclaimed films that netted him huge box-office returns and awards consideration, but they weren’t exactly the kind of fare children could watch. He wanted to change that, and Marvel was the best candidate.
In 2023, Douglas told The Guardian that the Ant-Man movies had introduced him to a whole new audience who now know his work, which he loves. He said, “Most of my films have been R-rated – for adults only. I get a big kick out of having these kids pulling on my jacket, saying, ‘Hank Pym! Ant-Man!’ It’s as close to immortality as an actor can get.”
Charmingly for an actor of his age, Douglas also revealed that he wasn’t put off by the notion of acting in a film with lots of special effects. In fact, the chance to experience green screen acting was one of the selling points of Ant-Man. He told Screen Rant, “My entire career is a lot of movies that have just been contemporary stories, with no special effects, no nothing, just kind of psychological real kind of stories.” He added, “This to me was just the excitement of saying, ‘Hey, this is great. I want to get into the Marvel world,” you know. I want to taste the Kool-Aid.”
Hell, Douglas even loved the experience of going to see Ant-Man more than some of his other movies. He’d been a producer and an actor in a certain kind of film for so long that he always knew what to expect when he sat down to watch their final cuts. With Ant-Man, though, he was only involved in material shot by the principal cast unit. He truly didn’t know what the other units were shooting and had no real idea what the effects would look like when it was all said and done.
He confessed that his jaw dropped when he saw the final film, which was the kind of clever family adventure he’d longed to be part of, instead of a lunkheaded, testosterone-fuelled action movie. He smiled, “It was a relatively seamless movie. It did this amazing job at kind of creating…a miniature credibility.” In the end, maybe being immortalised as a superhero isn’t so bad, after all.
