‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ Star Explains Why Ghost Is Not a Villain

When Ant-Man and the Wasp hits theaters this week fans will be introduced the film’s villain, Ghost. However, Hannah John-Kamen who plays the character doesn’t quite see Ghost as the bad guy.

In an interview with IGN, John-Kamen explains that while Ghost is an antagonist for Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), she’s certainly not a bad guy — at least in her own mind.

“I approach the character not like okay she’s a villain she’s a bad you know, she’s a threat, definitely, to the protagonists,” John-Kamen said. “She has an objective and she’s the good guy in her mind and everyone else is bad. You’ve got to find, I find, the humanity in whatever you’re playing when you are playing the antihero in a movie I think you really have to find the balance there of the threat but also the vulnerability with that, that comes with that.”

Finding the balance within the character is something that John-Kamen had to do more broadly than just a concept of good and evil when it came to Ghost. In comics, Ghost debuted as a male villain in Iron Man #219 from 1987 and even over three decades later, very little has been revealed about the character’s history. John-Kamen’s version of the character for Ant-Man and the Wasp then required a gender swap, but also left her with the ability to really figure out how to interpret the character, something she recently described to Collider as being “amazing”.

“I think with any role it’s always a blank slate to carve anything, whether you’re playing a superhero, a villain, anything from any comic, I think it’s important as an actor to have your own input, interpretation of that anyway,” she explained. “And so, it’s been amazing. It’s been so much fun to work with Peyton [Reed] on that.”

When it comes to the idea of Ghost as being more than simply a villain, John-Kamen also credited Marvel for their creation of a dynamic world with lots of shades of gray.

“What Marvel has done as well, which is great is that nothing is black and white,” she told IGN. “No one’s necessarily good or necessarily bad and I think that really gives an incredibly interesting dynamic.”

Fans will get to decide for themselves if Ghost is a villain or more than that when Ant-Man and the Wasp flies into theaters Friday, July 6.

Other upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe films include Captain Marvel on March 8, 2019, the fourth Avengers movie on May 3, 2019, Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5, 2019, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in 2020.