Whoa, baby! The real story behind the adorable star of 'Fantastic Four'
'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' brings a superpowered quartet into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but there's an important fifth member of that group: an adorable hero baby.
Directed by Matt Shakman, the newest Marvel movie is a retrofuturistic sci-fi adventure in which the Fantastic Four deal with the arrival of a world-devouring giant called Galactus (Ralph Ineson). He'll spare Earth if he can have the baby son of superhero couple Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby). The Fantastic Four choose to fight, and little Franklin (Ada Scott) becomes a key figure in the action-packed climax.
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The MCU is famous for its top-notch casting, and finding the right baby was as significant to Shakman as choosing his other main actors. 'We knew that the baby would ultimately probably be the biggest challenge of the movie,' he says. 'Just because it's a little bit easier to pull off a Silver Surfer than it is a baby who needs to be a big part of these emotional scenes.'
Filmmakers went down two different roads. Several babies were brought in for production purposes because they could only have youngsters on the set for short periods of time. (For example, they used a three-week-old infant for Sue's zero-gravity space birth.) At the same time, Shakman also needed to cast a 'hero baby,' which involve screen testing a bunch of kids, looking for the right one to be a scene partner for the A-list stars.
Who is the baby in 'Fantastic Four'?
They ultimately cast Ada, a little British girl who was 3 months old during filming. 'She has so much charisma,' Shakman says. 'There's so much intelligence in those eyes. Those eyes look just like Vanessa's eyes, they're kind of extraordinary in that way.'
Ada's face was scanned 'extensively multiple times' so that they could build a CGI model of her to use in effects-heavy action scenes or put on top of other babies' bodies for sequences that filmed over multiple nights, like Sue's big speech outside of the Baxter Building.
But the real Ada wowed Shakman in a couple of key emotional scenes. One featured just her and Pascal, as Reed Richards tells his son that he doesn't want Franklin to be like him and talks about his insecurities to the child. 'She's looking at him with such understanding but also curiosity,' the director says.
Is the baby in 'Fantastic Four' CGI?
The other major scene is at the end, where Franklin – who's embued with the 'Power Cosmic,' a big deal in Marvel lore – resurrects his mom after she dies in battle defeating Galactus.
'She showed up to play' that day, Shakman says of Ada. 'It was a really important moment, and Ada knew it was time to turn it on. It was kind of crazy. She seemed to understand, and I don't know how, what the scene was about. She was fully engaged with Vanessa, she was hyperfocused. Her little hands going down on the chest, that's her. The clapping after Vanessa comes back to life, that's her. That's all in camera.'
Behind the camera, Shakman had plenty of help with all things baby, too. There was an assistant director whose job was to find the various babies used for filming, while production assistants 'would sometimes jump in with toys trying to get eye lines to work,' Shakman says. Plus, there was a teacher or welfare worker on the set with the babies, along with the mom, dad and/or primary caregiver. In fact, Ada's mom sometimes dressed up in Kirby's supersuit to help get shots early on during filming.
By the time the movie finished, Ada "was very comfy crawling around on Vanessa,' Shakman says. And Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who played the motion-capture role of the Thing, also acted as 'an on-camera baby wrangler.'
While Shakman loves working with babies, there are times when they aren't always in the best mood or dozing off or upset because they're hungry. 'But I got so lucky,' the director says. 'I had this really special baby who delivered an incredible performance and I still don't know how it happened. So I thank the movie gods for that.'
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