How Galactus Devoured Actor Ralph Ineson

The moment Ralph Ineson’s towering stature enters into frame and his God-like voice is heard, the moviegoing audience knows they’re in particularly good hands. 

Thus, The Fantastic Four: First Steps director Matt Shakman knew full well the type of gravitas he’d be receiving when he offered Ineson the role of Galactus, the planet-devouring demigod and recurring foe of Marvel’s first family. In the first hour of what is now the definitive live-action adaptation of The Fantastic Four, Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) return home from an unsuccessful parley with the cosmic entity, and they are visibly shaken by the threat they just encountered, something Ineson’s performance conveyed with ease.

The Fantastic Four is not Ineson’s first foray into the cosmic side of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In 2014, he played a nameless Ravager pilot in James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, but that year happened to be career-altering regardless of his minuscule MCU role. By the time Guardians hit theaters in August, he had already wrapped a folk horror movie known as The Witch for a then-unknown writer-director named Robert Eggers. The first-time filmmaker provided Ineson with an all-too-rare lead role opposite newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy, and since The Witch’s 2015 Sundance premiere and 2016 theatrical release, his profile has increased dramatically.

Ineson and Eggers have re-teamed twice more for The Northman (2021) and Nosferatu (2024), and they’re currently “talking” about a potential fourth go-round on the upcoming Werwulf. The English actor considers their initial collaboration to be the turning point in his filmography, opening the door to the likes of Steven Spielberg (Ready Player One), the Coen brothers (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) and David Lowery (The Green Knight). It also allowed him to eventually level up from an anonymous Guardians character to his notorious Fantastic Four villain.

“‘[Rob Eggers] gave me this amazing part in an amazing film with other incredible actors, and that changed everything for me,” Ineson tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of The Fantastic Four’s July 25 theatrical release. “ [The Witch] gave me a lot of confidence in myself that I did actually have the chops to be able to play a character with a proper arc and some nuance. That led to more work with Rob and also Steven Spielberg, the Coen brothers and all sorts of amazing filmmakers. So the last ten years have been incredible, really.”

Ineson befriended Nicholas Hoult on the set of Eggers’ Nosferatu, and the two actors recently bonded over the fact that they’re portraying the supervillains of the summer’s two biggest films, The Fantastic Four and Superman. 

“I sent [Hoult] something off social media that said that he gave the all-time greatest superhero villain performance, and I said, ‘Hold my beer,’” Ineson jokes. “He then laughed and said, ‘It’s hardly fair. You’re a cosmic entity; I’m just a guy.’”

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Ineson also discusses the village that it took to create Galactus, as well as his experience on Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming Frankenstein.

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Have you and your Nosferatu co-star Nick Hoult had a chance to chat about being the villains of the summer’s two biggest movies?

We actually had a text conversation this morning about it. I sent him something off social media that said that he gave the all-time greatest superhero villain performance, and I said, “Hold my beer.” He then laughed and said, “It’s hardly fair. You’re a cosmic entity; I’m just a guy.” And I said, “Fair enough, but I am fighting four of them.” (Laughs.) And then he said something like, “But I get an upset tummy when I eat spicy food.” So I think he’s given up on the man-on-demigod battle.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ diretor Matt Shakman pretty much offered you the role of Galactus. How rare or not rare of an occurrence is this for you?

On this scale, it’s bizarrely rare. To get a role like this, I would’ve expected to tape and screen test for a while. But almost all the cast has the same story, which was a brief meeting with Matt and confirmation a few days later that they’d like you to play the part. So it was spookily smooth and easy. I do occasionally get offered parts straight nowadays, but they’re not usually of this magnitude. 

In 2014, you played a nameless Ravager pilot in James Gunn’s first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, and now you’re portraying one of Marvel’s most famous villains. What does your career ascent the last decade mean to you?

It’s just been a joy, to be honest. I’ve been a jobbing actor for 33 years now, and I’ve always loved my job. I love making films, and I love being on set. I’ve never had any huge expectations of getting lead parts in any kind of productions, but I’ve always enjoyed my work and I’ve had a good life. 

But then I met Rob Eggers for The Witch. He gave me this amazing part in an amazing film with other incredible actors, and that changed everything for me. It gave me a lot of confidence in myself that if it came down to it, I did actually have the chops to be able to play a character with a proper arc and some nuance. It was much more than I’d been given to play with before, and that led to more work with Rob and also Steven Spielberg, the Coen brothers and all sorts of amazing filmmakers. So the last ten years have been incredible, really. [Note: Ineson’s title character in David Lowery’s The Green Knight is another celebrated role of his.]

Speaking of Rob Eggers, has he made it known yet whether you’re going to be in Werwulf?

We are talking. (Ineson smiles.)

I wrongfully assumed Galactus was going to be a voiceover role, but it’s a full-fledged performance with your likeness. Did you initially assume it would be a VO role as well?

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. 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.

Is it true that the costume was so uncomfortable that you had to get massages during lunch?

Well, it wasn’t that the costume was so uncomfortable; it was more the fact that I’m 55 years old. 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. 

There’s an [Orson Welles] quote: “A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.” And bringing a character like Galactus onto the screen is a similar thing. I liken it to a Formula One team with a pit crew and hundreds of scientists and data analysts. In this case, they’re designing the suit and building the whole suit for my pit crew and I to then take onto the set and drive.

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. 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.

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.

And despite having a pit crew, you worked alone for the most part? You weren’t acting opposite your castmates; you were looking at marks on the ground?

Yeah, there were little crosses of electric tape on the floor, which is why you have to do the preparation work for the character long before you set foot on set. The day-to-day job of getting the character onto screen is more of a physical challenge, but to make that cross of tape on the floor real in your own mind, you have to have your emotional memory ready to go. So I went to the tallest buildings I could find to have Galactus’ perspective, and when I was looking down at the floor, I could see that perspective, not just a piece of tape.

You sympathize with Galactus because he has these planet-sized cravings that he has to satisfy, and he’s desperate to hand off his affliction to someone else so he can finally rest. Do you find a way to defend most of your villains’ positions? Or do you treat some of them as pure baddies?

Nobody is the bad guy in their own story. In a villain’s head, there are particular motivations for what they do. I’m talking about a normal human villain. I don’t think I’ve ever played a character that recognizes he is consciously evil or a mustache-twirling villain. 

But Galactus is a different concept because there’s no evil intent to what he does. He hungers. He has to consume planets to stay alive, and that’s maintained a balance in the universe for 14 billion years. So the humans or whatever living beings are on the planet are insignificant to him, but eating a planet is not a malevolent act. It’s just something he does, and it’s something that’s essential to him in order to satiate his hunger. So that’s why I don’t class him as evil, but he’s obviously a villain of sorts. If you are living on a planet that he’s about to devour, that makes him more than a little inconvenient, but I don’t think that necessarily makes him evil.

He does drive a hard bargain, though, one that raises the age-old trolley problem.

Yeah, that’s an interesting [spoiler].

I’m sure Marvel has contractual options on you, but how confident are you that you’ll revisit Galactus again someday? After all, anything is possible in the MCU.

Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot to explore in the lore, and he is a big character in the whole universe. But I would be one of the last people to know whether they are going to bring Galactus back. That’s a decision for Kevin [Feige] and the big boys, but I’d obviously love to come back and do some more Galactus.

As you just touched on moments ago, you’ve played an abundance of villains in your career. Have you always embraced this calling card? Or did you have a period of time where you tried to resist this trend?

As a jobbing actor, there’s only so much you can do to control the type of work you get. You’ve got to just keep working, and things do go in trends. Sometimes, you’ll be seen as one thing in your career, but there’s only certain things you can do to force those changes unless you happen to be financially stable enough to just turn down all work until the right job comes around. 

Also, with my voice and my face, I’m never really going to be playing the hero. There are still many different parts I can play. I don’t have to be villainous, but with my voice especially, people always see me on that side of the line.

For those of us who’ve been described as having a “gentle, soothing” voice, you and your voice are the envy of our community. How much did you develop your baritone speaking voice to be what it is today?

I had an unnaturally deep voice as a child, pre-puberty. I sounded like a grown man when I was about 11, which is quite odd, I think. My voice then slid even deeper, and it didn’t ever really break. So I always had a very deep voice, but over the years of working with it and doing quite a lot of voiceover work as well, age and the amount of work I do has naturally made it deeper. 

I once asked Jeffrey Wright about the secret to his voice, and he partially chalked it up to whiskey and cigarettes. 

I do smoke and drink, but I gave up smoking for five years and it didn’t change at all. Smoking does give some kind of an edge, but it’s actually genetic. It’s a tone of voice I inherited from my grandmother. My dad’s mother was a tall woman with a very deep voice, and all her sons have an edge in their voice. But I’m the deepest of us all, and I’m the only one to make it pay. (Laughs.)

After helping Rob reimagine a classic in Nosferatu, you just appeared in Guillermo del Toro’s own reimagining of Frankenstein. How would you describe that experience?

Oh, it was a real joy. Guillermo is an incredibly charismatic man. He directs the set with such gusto and in a way I’ve never really seen before. He’ll occasionally operate the camera, or he’ll direct supporting actors as well as the main actors. The scene we did was a big lecture hall scene with a couple of hundred extras, and there was some quite intricate work, acting-wise and animatronics-wise. It was quite a complicated scene, and it took the best part of a week to shoot. 

But all day, every day, he was the most energetic, funny person in the room. He works with the same crew all the time, and everybody loves working for Guillermo. So when you’re on those kinds of sets where everybody is just delighted to be there, it’s just a joy of a job, and it all starts from Guillermo’s incredible passion and energy.

I’m a fan of William Brent Bell’s Lord of Misrule, and I’m still amazed that your character was originally written to be a woman. What was your first impression of Brent’s unconventional pitch?

It was a really strange one. Brent and I are friends from a previous movie we did together, and when he came over to England [to prep Lord of Misrule], he said, “Do you want to meet for a drink?” And I was like, “Yeah.” He then sent me the script without any direction, and he went, “Read the script.” So I read it, and I was like, “There’s nothing in here for me.” I was too old to play the husband, and I couldn’t really find anything else in it apart from the green man who announces the fair. 

So I thought, “To be honest, it’s a bit strange if you’re asking me to play that, mate.” But he went, “No, I’ve got this idea. Why don’t you play Jocelyn, this kind of 70-year-old witch character?” (Ineson then mimics his reluctant response of “okay.”) But then we thought about it some more, and it became strangely easy to convert the character. You didn’t even have to change the name because it’s a unisex name.

Lastly, I really loved The Creator, and the way Gareth Edwards made $80 million look like $200 million needs to be analyzed by every studio. Kevin Feige actually just remarked the other day that he reached out to The Creator’s VFX company, presumably ILM, in hopes of achieving the same outcome for Marvel. Compared to the other big movies you’ve worked on, could you tell that Gareth was achieving scale more economically than most?

From my point of view, I immediately noticed my relationship to the camera and to the director. We were shooting on these tiny Sony [FX3] cameras that cost $4,000, and they required very few setups. That made the cranes that you use so much smaller and more economical. We also did quite a lot of shooting where the camera was on a steering wheel rig, and it would just be me, Gareth and the sound recordist filming shots in the car. That’s all we needed to drive around and shoot this huge big-budget movie.

Everything just seemed compact. And on one level, it almost felt like we were making a student film. As an actor, when you’re that close to the director and the director is also operating the camera, that intimate and immediate access to the director is really cool. He sent me so much about the world building that they’d done before filming started, so I already understood the movie that I was in. But it was amazing how intimate the shooting experience was, and it wasn’t anything like a huge big-budget movie.

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The Fantastic Four: First Steps opens July 25 in movie theaters nationwide.