Evangeline Lilly Hopes To Represent Women Well in Ant-Man

Evangeline Lilly is taking her job seriously. That may sound odd when speaking of a role in a film where a superhero is shrunk to the size of an ant, but she sees gravity in it nonetheless. “I have ...
Evangeline Lilly Hopes To Represent Women Well in Ant-Man
Written by Mike Tuttle
  • Evangeline Lilly is taking her job seriously. That may sound odd when speaking of a role in a film where a superhero is shrunk to the size of an ant, but she sees gravity in it nonetheless.

    “I have to be very careful and responsible about the character…because she is in the film representing women at large,” Lilly says about her role as Hope van Dyne in Ant-Man.

    After all the talk about how well — or not-so-well — women felt they were represented by Scarlett Johansson’s character Black Widow in the last Avengers flick, Lilly may have a point.

    When original screenwriter Edgar Wright bowed out of the Ant-Man project, Adam McKay and Paul Rudd took on the project, which entailed some rewrites of the script. Some of those changes affected Evangeline Lilly’s character quite a lot.

    “Originally she was a very sort of film noir kind of character. She was almost, like what you would expect out of a legit graphic novel or a comic book – which I loved, by the way,” Lilly said. “I was sold. I was like, ‘Yes, this is going to be so much fun to play a real caricature, almost, of this woman!'”

    Lilly said the Rudd-McKay rewrites kept the soul of the character, but softened her a bit.

    “What really ended up happening with the rewrites is I think she just developed more dimensions and more humanity, became a little bit more relatable, little bit more accessible, a little less of sort of untouchable caricature and more of a human caricature,” Lilly explained.

    How well she handled the task of representing women in a big-budget film with “Marvel” in the credits will be judged soon enough. For now, fans — men and women alike — are just excited to see what she is bringing to the table.

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