John Malkovich Rejected ‘Grueling’ Marvel Offers Before Fantastic Four: First Steps: ‘Pay Me’

John Malkovich is soon to make his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut. But it wasn’t his first superheroic offer. 

The Oscar-nominated actor, 71, couldn’t say much about his mysterious role in the upcoming The Fantastic Four: First Steps in an interview with GQ published Tuesday, Feb. 18, but he confirmed that he declined other Marvel roles that had previously been on the table. 

“The reason I didn’t do them had nothing to do with any artistic considerations whatsoever,” he said. “I didn’t like the deals they made, at all.”

Noting that Marvel and such comic book adaptations are “quite grueling to make,” Malkovich added, “If you’re going to hang from a crane in front of a green screen for six months, pay me. You don’t want to pay me, it’s cool, but then I don’t want to do it, because I’d rather be onstage, or be directing a play, or doing something else.”

Malkovich stars opposite Ayo Edebiri in writer-director Mark Anthony Green’s A24 thriller Opus (in theaters March 14), playing a reclusive celebrity pop star who appears to be the leader of a strange cult. In the newly rebooted Fantastic Four, the actor’s role is unknown; he was spotted in a teaser trailer with a mop of curly gray hair and beard. 

His first Marvel role, it turns out, felt “not that dissimilar to doing theater,” the stage veteran told GQ. “You imagine a bunch of stuff that isn’t there and do your little play.”

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Elsewhere in his interview, Malkovich said he moved to a suburb outside Boston, Massachusetts to be near his young granddaughter. Of his longtime partner Nicoletta Peyran, with whom he shares two children, he said marriage was “never a goal of hers, never really a goal of mine.”

Among Malkovich’s other upcoming films are the animated A Winter's Journey; Sacrifice costarring Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Evans and Salma Hayek; and Sergiu Celibidache biopic The Yellow Tie.

Opus is in theaters March 14. The Fantastic Four: First Steps is in theaters July 25.