As a star of "Ant-Man," Evangeline Lilly has inside access to what's going on behind-the-scenes at Marvel Studios, and though the studio has gotten some heat for its treatment of female superheroes, she thinks it's actually carving a path for its heroines.
"What is easy to focus on is what hasn't been done in the past. I just find it really exciting and refreshing that there's a lot of stuff that is being done right now," she tells Zap2it. "There is a genuine and sincere and dedicated intention within the Marvel company to really address that void — and there is a void, of course. We all recognize it."
It was meeting Victoria Alonso, Marvel's Executive Vice President of Visual Effects, that brought that viewpoint into focus for Lilly.
"She is a force to be reckoned with. She is a powerful, beautiful, intelligent, capable woman. When I met her, I thought, 'Oh,'" Lilly says. "Marvel have always understood that women are important, women are necessary, women are capable, women are intelligent, that they're on equal footing with men. It's just a matter of carving that path, because it just hasn't been done before. They're pioneering it in the superhero world, and I can't think of anyone better to do it than Marvel."
Lilly's "Ant-Man" character Hope Van Dyne is an example of a way Marvel is using its female characters differently. As the daughter of Michael Douglas's Hank Pym (the original Ant-Man) she's such a strong and talented person that the movie frequently grapples with why Hope isn't the person to take up the mantle of Ant-Man.
It's Hope's relationship with her father and not her relationship with Paul Rudd's Scott Lang (who becomes Ant-Man) that is pivotal to her story, and that's something Lilly is incredibly proud of.
"Our film is an example of a film that doesn't have a love story or a romance anchoring it at all. I was really excited at the beginning when I first got the script and realized, 'Oh my God, this is a woman who is a woman in her own right. It's not about her [romantic] relationship with a man. It's about her relationship with her father, but not her love interest,'" she says.
There is a romantic element to the film, but Lilly is proud "they didn't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater" — as in, this could be a movie where a love story wasn't integral to the plot but did enhanced the story being told.
"Romance and love is a part of our lives," she says. "I just loved the fact that it could be there, but it didn't have to anchor the film; it didn't have to anchor the female story in any way, shape or form. For me, in this film it felt very realistic. It didn't feel sensationalized, it didn't feel dramatized; it just felt real, like how it happens in life, for most of us anyway."
Though Hope gets her share of action scenes and is stronger in many ways than Scott is, it wasn't any of those fighting sequences that Lilly feels is Hope's best moment. Instead, it's the scene where her character comes to terms with her decades-long resentment towards her father.
"The scene between Hank and Hope, the big emotional scene in the middle of the film, is kind of my proudest moment of the film. In the writing of that scene, there isn't the soap opera drama that you so often see in big tentpole films. It was just very real," she says. "I felt Hope's strength shone more in that scene and in her ability to forgive than it did in any action sequence or any other moment of the film where she is outwardly portraying strength. I just thought that inner strength in her, to be able to have compassion in a moment where she was in pain, that was my favorite Hope moment."
"It was such a great juxtaposition because the world is so wild and the ant stuff is so cool and sort of mind-blowing, but the human stories were all very relatable and simple," Lilly adds.
"Ant-Man" hits theaters on July 17.
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