The last time we saw Evangeline Lilly's Hope van Dyne, she was over the moon. After all, her father, Michael Douglas' Dr. Hank Pym, had finally accepted her future as a costumed hero, and revealed a new prototype suit for her to wear. It makes for one of the best end credits scenes in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe... but it has a funny real world ending. As it turns out, Lilly's first time actually getting to wear the suit for her titular role in Ant-Man and The Wasp didn't exactly go perfectly, as she explained during an on-set interview:
The first time I put on the suit it didn't fit. [laughs] So it was very anticlimactic. It was like, 'This is gonna be... ugggh. This doesn't work. Why is my bum flat? I have a really good bum, guys! Come on. Work with me here.'
Evangeline Lilly shared this funny story when I was on set last year while Ant-Man and The Wasp was still filming down in Atlanta, Georgia. As part of a roundtable interview with a small group of other journalists, the actress was asked about her first time wearing the Wasp costume, and she shared that it wasn't the most memorable experience in the world. It turns out that it's pretty hard to nail a superhero get-up on the first try, and so it had to go back to the artisans and be reworked after the initial fitting.
They didn't exactly nail it on the second time either, however. The truth is that it took months of hard work to get the whole thing right, and the production even brought on a special seamstress to accentuate a certain aspect of the Wasp costume that Evangeline Lilly felt was important. Said the actress,
It was four months of in and out of suits, and fitting, and tweaking, and tapering at the right spots, and letting out at the right spots, and making everything fit like a glove to my body - which is very, very difficult. And our costume team are wildly talented people. We brought on this one particular seamstress, April [McCoy], who has worked with dancers before, and just has an uncanny sense of a woman's body, and what clothes need to do on that body to make it sing. She has miraculously made my legs look longer than they really are, which was one of my first requests [laughs].
It was clearly a lot of work for all involved, but as you can tell looking at the finished result in the Ant-Man and The Wasp trailers and various stills it was all worth it. When it was finally perfected, Evangeline Lilly absolutely loved the finished result, and told us that she tried to spend as much time in the suit as she possibly could. Said Lilly,
Once it was perfect, once the suit came to a place where I put it on and you could feel everyone in the room went, 'Oh, there she is,' that was fuckin' cool. [laughs] Then it was like they couldn't get it off of me. I was like, 'No, just let me wear it a little longer.' And I'm dancing around the room. I should've been fighting around the room, but I'm not actually the Wasp; I'm Evangeline Lilly. Hi, I dance.
We've only seen previews of what the Wasp costume can do, but it won't be long until we see the thing fully function on the big screen. Ant-Man and The Wasp, will be here in just a few short weeks, so get excited, and stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for more from my time on set!
