In the mid-credits scene of Ant-Man, Hank Pym presents his daughter Hope van Dyne with a prototype Wasp suit, teasing that Evangeline Lilly's character would eventually become a superhero in her own right. That promise will finally be delivered upon in next month's Ant-Man and the Wasp. Hope will be donning a Wasp suit that has far cooler capabilities than her partner Ant-Man's duds. However, as Evangeline Lilly found out, upgrading from the normal clothes she wore in the first film comes with its own set of challenges. One surprising one just so happened to be how difficult it was to eat in the suit, as she explained:
After a while, the only thing that was a bummer wearing the suit was I like to eat, and I like to eat in large quantities, and I'm in a very tight suit where I can barely breathe let alone eat. So I had to eat in tiny quantities all day, so that was irritating. I ate little bits of bee pollen all day and that's all I can eat.
I don't know that we've ever heard another big screen superhero talk about the suit making it difficult to eat before. The costumes have been described as suffocating and as a "body condom," so given their claustrophobic nature, I can see how eating too much while in costume could make wearing it even more unpleasant. According to Evangeline Lilly herself, the actress had to improvise and eat insect-sized portions throughout the day. Also, she was apparently sating her appetite between crime-fighting takes by snacking on supposed superfood bee pollen. How very on brand for the Wasp to be eating a food produced by bees.
Despite the difficulties Evangeline Lilly faced when trying to satisfy her far from ant-sized appetite, she actually thinks that she has it better than most of the MCU heroes. She spoke about her love for the costume to NDTV during the film's press conference in Taipei, saying:
My suit, I don't know if this is true, but I believe my suit is the most comfortable of the MCU. I don't know if it was just because I liked it so much, and I felt so cool in it and I really wanted to wear it. I slept in it, I ate in it, I bathed in it, I never took it off... ever. I'm very method.
I imagine that the MCU costume comfort scale ranges from 'claustrophobic nightmare' to 'just bearable' so I don't know how Evangeline Lilly is measuring this, but at least she likes the Wasp costume. For someone who has played a badass elf in The Hobbit movies, she seems to really dig being a superhero, joking about leaving her costume on all the time, Daniel Day Lewis method-style. She's right to feel cool in the costume. too, it looks awesome and way cooler than her co-star's. Judging by the trailers, Wasp looks like a real highlight of Ant-Man and the Wasp and she should more than live up to her elevated billing.
Evangeline Lilly's character will have a unique origin story in Ant-Man and the Wasp in that she is already a fully formed hero who may feel like she doesn't really need Paul Rudd's Scott Lang anymore. We'll get to see just how well she can hold her own when she faces off with the villainous Ghost.
We still have a lot of questions about Ant-Man and the Wasp and this movie should shed some light on what happened with these characters post-Civil War. Fortunately, we don't have too long to wait to get some answers. Ant-Man and the Wasp goes super-size when it opens in theaters on July 6th. For all of this year's biggest releases, check out our release schedule.
