[Warning: This article contains The Fantastic Four: First Steps spoilers.] By the time the Fantastic Four face Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the cosmically-changed quartet — Reed (Pedro Pascal), Sue (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny (Joseph Quinn), and Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) — have already saved their world from the likes of the intangible cosmonaut the Red Ghost, mad scientist the Mad Thinker, the ancient alchemist Diablo, and the tech wizard Bentley Wittman. But there’s one frightful foe in particular that Kirby wants to see Sue Storm take on in the MCU after Doctor Doom (Robert Downey Jr.).
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“Psycho-Man, because he comes in and really whips things up for Sue,” the actress told ComicBook, referring to the Fantastic Four villain who ruled over the Microverse, a sub-atomic parallel dimension.
Introduced in 1967’s Fantastic Four Annual #5 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Psycho-Man was able to stimulate fear, doubt, or hate in his victims with the press of a button from his Control Box. (As it happens, Reed announced Sue’s pregnancy to the family in that very same issue.) The Psycho-Man later turned the Invisible Girl into Malice, Mistress of Hate, and turned her against her family. Once freed from Psycho-Man’s emotion-manipulating powers, Sue rechristened herself the Invisible Woman.
“I’m dying to do Malice. She’s come from a really tough background,” Kirby told Variety about Sue’s comic book backstory. “She lost her mother in a car crash. Her dad tried to save her mother. He couldn’t. He then spiraled, became an alcoholic, got locked up in prison for murdering a loan shark, and then died. Sue had to become a mother to Johnny. They were orphans. They had to fight for themselves.”
“What I loved about her was that she chose a path that was inherently a positive one. She chose to keep her heart open and to stay warm,” she continued. Although Sue is mostly benevolent in First Steps, the matriarch of the Fantastic Four instructs brother Johnny to kill the Silver Surfer when the herald of Galactus pursues her newborn son, Franklin; later, after Galactus offers to spare Earth in exchange for Franklin, Sue angrily turns invisible in an emotional outburst when Reed considers sacrificing their son to save the world.
The most powerful member of the Fantastic Four, Sue’s ability to wield psionic fields of invisible force is on full display when she summons all of her strength to push Galactus into a teleportation bridge to save Franklin.
“There was a line within a scene that isn’t in it anymore with Mole Man – who I absolutely love. I’m so excited that we might get to do more with him if we get to do any more of this, because Paul [Walter Hauser] is amazing,” Kirby said. “But in it, she said something like, ‘I could give you an aneurysm if I wanted to in two seconds.’ In the comics, Sue uses that threat quite a lot: ‘I could put a force field in your brain and give you an aneurysm. I could put an air bubble inside of you and kill you in an instant.’ These powers are also really lethal and really dangerous.”
“But these four have chosen to unite the global community and be a force for good. But they could also choose to be a force for bad,” she continued. “I love the concept of choice, not just, ‘Oh, we’re superheroes, that’s who we are.’ She’s made this decision, but at her fingertips, she could be lethal. It felt so real to me that somebody that’s trying to be a force for good also has the capacity, like we all do, for the light and the dark.”
Kirby added that there was “something so allegorical” about Sue in the comics, who goes through a psychologically traumatic event, is turned into the villainess Malice to fight her family, and then decides to reclaim her power — not as the Invisible Girl, but the Invisible Woman.
“She was called Invisible Girl. Then Psycho-Man comes and disrupts everything, and she has a meeting with her own dark side in Malice,” Kirby explained. “She comes back, and she renames herself Invisible Woman. So she transforms from a girl to a woman. There’s something about meeting the hardest parts of yourself in Malice that felt extremely poignant to me. I’m really hopeful I might be allowed to be Malice at some point for her.”
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is now playing only in theaters.
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