Fantastic Four’s Galactus Says Son Put Him Through MCU Boot Camp, “Endless Comic Reading”

The actor got acquainted with his role fast.

July 20, 2025, 5:32pm

The Fantastic Four: First Steps star Ralph Ineson wasn’t a comic book aficionado when he was first cast as Galactus, but he is now. The actor said that he got some reading material straight from Marvel when he landed the role, but his real schooling came from his own son. At a press roundtable attended by ComicBook, he joked that his son was “like a Victorian schoolmaster” putting him through “like, an MCU boot camp for a month.” This gives Ineson an extensive perspective on the character that fans should be happy with — especially since he confirmed that he didn’t rely on the last movie adaptation to inform his performance. First Steps hits theaters on Friday, July 25th.

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“They gave me the initial run around the coming of Galactus. So I first read those, but I also have a 25 year old son who’s a Marvel obsessive,” Ineson said. “So as soon as I got the part, he just took it upon himself to become like a Victorian schoolmaster and had me in like an MCU boot camp for a month. And, you know, two films a day, endless, endless comic reading, homework and everything. So, yeah, I was well and thoroughly drilled when I got the part.”

“I didn’t use the previous films as any kind of reference,” Ineson added later. “But I did watch a lot of natural disaster stuff because I was fascinated in the power that Galactus has over the natural human world. Like, if his arrest could cause tsunamis, you know, a cough could cause a tornado. The power that he has and how that would relate to the natural world. And I wanted his voice to sound like tumbling rocks as well.”

The MCU is under a lot of pressure to create a faithful depiction of Galactus on screen, as fans were not happy with the character’s impressionistic depiction back in 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Galactus is a part of Marvel’s epic cosmic history, and the Multiverse Saga is the perfect place to do him justice. So far, it looks like First Steps has pulled it off, at least based on trailers and early reviews.

At the same press event, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige said that he felt the old fear that a comic-accurate Galactus would come across “silly” had been thoroughly disproven. He argued that the MCU has succeeded by embracing the most stylistic visual features of Marvel lore, taking for example Loki’s iconic horned helmet.

“Loki’s horns comes to mind — when we were doing the first Thor, and that was many years ago now, and it had been a handful of years from the Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer that had Galactus in it. And I thought, ‘We don’t want to hide it. He’s got gigantic, almost makes no sense, huge horns, and we need to embrace that. And we have an actor in Tom [Hiddleston] who can wear it, who can pull it off,’” Feige said. “In Ralph, we have the same thing. So it is embracing that, and knowing that those designs are awesome. Those designs stand the test of time over and over and over again for a reason.”

We’ll all get a chance to see the MCU’s Galactus for ourselves in just a few days. The Fantastic Four: First Steps hits theaters on Friday, July 29th.