After being depicted as a giant, hurricane-like cloud with no personality in 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Galactus is getting a chance at cinematic redemption. Ralph Ineson has been cast as the planet-eater for The Fantastic Four, which is is slated on the 2025 release schedule. Naturally details are being kept under lock and key regarding how Galactus is being used in the upcoming Marvel movie, but Ineson did share how his son has been schooling him on Marvel lore while he was praising the flick’s script.
Ineson, known from projects like the UK version of The Office, Chernobyl, The Witch and The Green Knight, stopped by The Movie Dweeb to talk about his career, with The Fantastic Four being one of the final topics of conversation. The actor mentioned that there was no way for him to keep a casting like that “fully” a secret, so he told “a couple” people he trusts “very well” about Galactus early on, including his son. That’s come in handy, as he said the following when he was asked what he thought of the script:
It’s great. I’m not someone who knows the whole lore of Marvel. My son is an expert. He’s 25, so he’s been schooling me for the last couple of months.
Needless to say there have been plenty of actors over the years who’ve joined a superhero movie who’ve never read a comic book, and not everyone has the time to do a deep dive into the source material to prepare for their role. Luckily for Ralph Ineson, his son’s been on hand to feed him knowledge on Galactus ahead of The Fantastic Four’s production, presumably like how he debuted in the pages of 1966’s Fantastic Four #48, how he once a denizen who survived the that existed prior to the Big Bang, and how he uses heralds like The Silver Surfer to find planets for him to sustain his life force.
Between that and giving his dad suggestions on what to read, it sounds like Ralph Ineson’s has a good grip on Galactus’ deal, which has led to him appreciating The Fantastic Four’s script even more. He continued:
He’s been teaching me all of that. Yeah, I got the part, read the script and was like ‘That’s cool as fuck.’ And now the more I’ve understood about the universe [and] the way it all fits together, I’m like ‘Yeah, that’s really cool as fuck.’
It’ll be a while until we learn what precisely Ineson finds “really cool as fuck” about The Fantastic Four. However, it is worth pointing out that The Silver Surfer is also confirmed to appear in the movie, though rather than it being Norrin Radd as is traditional, it will be his love interest from the comics, Shalla-Bal, played by Julia Garner. It’s also been teased that The Fantastic Four will take place in a different universe than the one most of the MCU’s movies and TV shows take place in, which has me worried that that this movie could show Galactus destroying this version of Earth.
The Fantastic Four’s cast also includes Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing and Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/The Human Torch, among others. The Matt Shakman-directed and Josh Friedman-written movie hits theaters on July 25, 2025.
