Michael Douglas says he asked Marvel to kill off his character, but the studio wouldn't let him. The Oscar winner, who plays original Ant-Man Hank Pym, was asked on Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast whether it was true that he wanted out.
"I would have been killed off after the second one, but they wouldn't let me," he said. He returned for Ant-Man and the Wasp in 2018, Avengers: Endgame in 2019 and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in 2023.
He explained that he was drawn in by curiosity. He told his agents he had never done a green screen movie and wanted to see what one was like.
But the work was hard. "It's hard acting, man," he said.
He praised Paul Rudd as a wonderful actor and the cast as a lovely group, "but then you can't get out of it". He joked that he should have read the fine print of his contract.
He has said something similar before. On The View in 2024, Douglas said that getting killed off was his request for the third Ant-Man film, and that he had pitched a way to do it, shrinking to ant size and exploding.
Speaking to Deadline last year, he said he didn't think he would appear in more Marvel films, and that he would act again only if something good came up. The veteran actor has enjoyed a long and illustrious career in Hollywood, featuring in numerous blockbuster and critically acclaimed projects over the decades.
His journey in the superhero franchise brought a fresh wave of younger fans to his massive global following, though the physical demands of modern digital filmmaking tested his patience at times. Fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe continue to speculate whether Hank Pym might make a surprise cameo in future multiverse projects despite the actor's stated reluctance.