Julia Garner, known for her work in ‘Ozark’ and ‘Inventing Anna’, hopes to reach a ‘different kind of audience’ with ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’.
The 31-year-old actress, who has been cast as Shalla-Bal/Silver Surfer in the film, told ‘Entertainment Weekly’: “She’s so different from anyone I’ve ever played and that was also another reason why I wanted to do it. I don’t expect everybody to watch ‘Ozark’, ‘Inventing Anna’ or ‘The Assistant’. Some people are only going to watch certain things, so that’s why I want to branch out to every genre and that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to do ‘Marvel’ - it’s reaching a different kind of audience.”
Garner read ‘a lot of the Fantastic Four and Silver Surfer comics’ before she began filming the new movie. She said she relished working on a ‘Marvel’ project, reported ‘femalefirst.co.uk’.
Garner, who stars in the movie alongside the likes of Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby and Joseph Quinn, said: “When I got presented with this opportunity, I was like, ‘Wait, what? Me?’ Yeah, I was in disbelief, almost because it was so cool. I knew who the Silver Surfer was and I got to know the Silver Surfer more when I signed on to the project. I really dived in. I read a lot of the ‘Fantastic Four and Silver Surfer’ comics before starting the project and I knew that this ‘Fantastic Four’ was going to be told in a very different way than even the other movies.”
The actor’s performance was actually inspired by the comic books that she read. But she revealed that, unlike her on-screen character, she can’t actually surf. Asked if she knew how to surf before being cast in the new ‘Marvel’ movie, Garner said: “I am actually afraid of the ocean. So no, but I can act. I have some friends that know how to surf and they showed me some moves before I went out to London to just kind of get the body position of it all. And then I realised shortly after I was in London that I used some surfing moves, but then I also used a lot of what I saw in the comic books.”
“There were different poses that, the way that they would draw them, they weren’t surf poses - they almost looked like something you would see in sculptures. So, I incorporated surfing with the poses of a sculpture, like moving elegantly, like a dance. So, it was kind of a mixture of things, but a lot of it was from the comics that inspired me,” she added.