Matt Shakman owes his career to a Superman costume.
Before Marvel Studios hired him to direct “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” one of the most consequential movies in the company’s history — before he helmed more than 130 episodes of television, from “Everwood” and “Ugly Betty” to “Game of Thrones” and “WandaVision” and was a child actor on sitcoms like “Diff’rent Strokes” and “Night Court” — Shakman wore only superhero attire. Every day as a little kid in Ventura, California, he would dress up as comic-book icons like Batman and Captain America, in suits he often helped to craft himself, with the utter conviction that the clothes transformed him into whatever hero he happened to be emulating.
“It was so absurd that my kindergarten teacher actually had to call my parents and say, ‘I think it would be really great if Matt came dressed as Matt,’” he says, sitting in his office on the Disney lot. He remembers his parents cobbling together a civilian outfit from his older brother’s hand-me-downs, but he was so committed to the bit that he wore a swimsuit as underwear so he could secretly go to school as Aquaman.
When a TV news producer told Shakman’s father that his 4-year-old son — clad that day in the Man of Steel’s blue-and-red regalia — would be a natural actor, his parents put him in a Saturday-morning drama class. That led to an agent, which led to commercials, which led to a guest spot on “The Facts of Life,” which led to three seasons as a series regular on the late ’80s “Growing Pains” spinoff “Just the Ten of Us.”
“It wasn’t that I was desperate to perform,” Shakman says. “I’m actually not an outgoing person. I was just fiercely devoted to my life of the imagination.” He stops himself. “Just so the Marvel fans know,” he says, “I dressed up as Spider-Man almost as much, if not more so, than Superman.”
Given that Shakman says this while surrounded by Fantastic Four memorabilia, including a rare copy of “The Fantastic Four #1,” the November 1961 inaugural issue of the comic written by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, it’s obvious that the filmmaker counts himself among Marvel’s devoted fans.
As he bluntly puts it, “There would be no Marvel Studios, there would be no Marvel Comics, without the Fantastic Four.”
The four heroes were born out of desperation. Marvel was struggling to publish a hit as its rival, DC Comics, found success with its ensemble of superheroes. Lee and Kirby’s groundbreaking innovation was to create flawed characters with everyday human problems who just happened to have superpowers: Reed Richards, aka the super stretchy Mister Fantastic; his girlfriend, and then wife, Sue Storm, aka the Invisible Woman; Sue’s hotheaded younger brother, Johnny Storm, aka the Human Torch; and Reed’s best friend, Ben Grimm, aka the Thing, a powerfully strong, rock-bodied … thing. They became a sensation; Spider-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men and Black Panther (the latter first introduced in the pages of “The Fantastic Four”) soon followed, buoying Marvel into the cultural vanguard.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby and Joseph Quinn in “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.” Jay Maidment / Marvel Studios
In a quirk of irony, “The Fantastic Four” is arriving in theaters at a comparably precarious moment for Marvel. After more than a decade of box office supremacy, the once mighty Marvel Cinematic Universe (along with much of the superhero genre as a whole) has strained to connect with global audiences at the heights it reached just three years ago. The three previous attempts to bring Marvel’s First Family to the big screen — in the mid-aughts and again in 2015, when the characters were part of 20th Century Fox’s stable of Marvel characters before Disney acquired the studio in 2019 — weren’t exactly barn-burning blockbusters either.
Those stand-alone films, however, didn’t carry the responsibility of anchoring the MCU’s storytelling future. The newest iteration, with Pedro Pascal as Reed, Vanessa Kirby as Sue, Joseph Quinn as Johnny and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben, are also serving as linchpin characters for Marvel’s behemoth 2026 release “Avengers: Doomsday,” featuring Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom, the Fantastic Four’s greatest nemesis.
Shakman understands all of it — the cultural legacy, the commercial headaches, the creative hurdles. “There’s a lot of pressure in wanting to do right by the characters, wanting to do right by Kirby and Lee, wanting to do right by all of the amazing comic writers who have been a part of developing this over the last 60-plus years,” he says. In the same breath, he adds, “Corporate pressures aren’t my burdens to shoulder.”
Instead, his greatest challenge, he says, “is making a movie that feels personal” amid the superhero pomp and circumstance. And that meant drawing on his distinctive path through the industry to drill down on what it means to be a family, with a story that focuses on Reed and Sue having a first child together.
“They are parents first,” he says. “They are scientists and explorers second. And they’re superheroes only when they have to be. I come at this as a dad and as a husband. That’s what makes it so special to me.”
In the spring of 2022, Marvel Studios found itself without a director for “The Fantastic Four” after “Spider-Man” filmmaker Jon Watts walked away from the gig, citing his exhaustion with superhero cinema. At the time, Shakman was on board to direct an adaptation of another beloved franchise that began in the 1960s, the fourth “Star Trek” movie with Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto; that project was far enough along, Shakman says, that “we had stages, we had crew, we were moving ahead.”
But he’d loved his experience directing all nine episodes of “WandaVision,” so he started going into Marvel Studios to talk with producer Grant Curtis, Marvel Studios co-president Louis D’Esposito and chief Kevin Feige about what he might want to do with the movie. In one of those meetings, a simple gesture convinced Curtis that Shakman was right for the job.
“He showed a picture of himself holding his daughter right after she was born,” Curtis says. “To see how much importance he put into family — when we saw that, I was like, ‘Oh, this is a no-brainer.’”
Meanwhile, by the late summer, the “Star Trek” film had “changed dramatically,” Shakman says. The stages went away. The crew was let go. “It didn’t have a start date anymore.” “The Fantastic Four,” meanwhile, was churning ahead, so Shakman swapped one cosmic story about hope and optimism for another. (Despite some prodding, Shakman remains tight-lipped on what his version of “Trek” would’ve looked like: “The core idea, I think, remains the same. I really hope they get a chance to make that movie.”)
Shakman’s central pitch for “The Fantastic Four” was to start with Reed and Sue becoming parents when they’re established superheroes and well into their marriage, and how that decision ripples into Johnny’s and Ben’s lives. The idea was in part rooted in an aversion to retelling the quartet’s origin story, which had been depicted in previous films. More crucially for the 49-year-old filmmaker, he intimately understands how it feels to start a family later in life. “I was 40 when I had my daughter, and she definitely took a little bit of assistance from science,” he says. “I think anyone who’s tackling something of a large scale has to find something deeply personal in it to connect to.”
Pedro Pascal, Ada Scott and Vanessa Kirby in “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.” Marvel Studios
With a budget north of $200 million, this movie is, by several orders of magnitude, the largest undertaking of Shakman’s career. His only previous feature directing experience is the 2014 indie thriller “Cut Bank,” starring Liam Hemsworth and John Malkovich, and “everything about it was very scrappy,” he says. By contrast, Marvel used the entire back lot at Pinewood Studios in London to re-create Times Square, and the Fantastic Four’s high-rise apartment was built as a contiguous two-story set.
Even though Shakman had never tackled a production this complex, his colleagues describe him as affable and totally open to collaboration. “Looking at him, you would never know the pressure he was under,” Curtis says. In person, he’s a rapt listener who’s not at a loss for what he wants to say, like when he waves off a question about whether he was daunted by tackling a gargantuan studio production for the first time.
“I’ve been working in this business, hitting marks and walking the Disney lot, since I was 4 years old,” he says. “I’ve grown up both in front of and behind the camera, and I feel like I’ve just been adding to my tool kit as I’ve gotten older.”
A lack of ambition has never been a problem either. After graduating from Yale with a degree in art history and theater, Shakman founded a theater in Los Angeles, the Black Dahlia, that focused on new plays. It garnered enough industry attention to start Shakman on a prolific career directing television.
“I began a period of staying up all night long, painting scenery and building sets and doing whatever I needed to do at my little 30-seat theater,” he says. “And then showing up to ‘Mad Men’ or ‘Six Feet Under’ or whatever, where there were huge departments of people who could build those sets and paint those walls.”
By the time Marvel hired him for “WandaVision,” Shakman was also working as the creative director of the Geffen Playhouse; when other theaters struggled to stay afloat during the pandemic, he presided over virtual “Geffen Stayhouse” productions that kept the theater alive.
“My career has been about trying to balance theater and television,” he says. “Television, you have your first rehearsal, your tech rehearsal, your opening night and your closing night all within an hour. And theater, you could spend six weeks talking about one moment. It’s nice to be able to mix things up.” It turns out that mixing things up is precisely how he approached making “The Fantastic Four.”
The first time Moss-Bachrach talked with Shakman about playing Ben, it was over Zoom in late 2023. “I had a really nice connection with Matt and then forgot about the whole thing,” Moss-Bachrach says. “Then a few months later, I was walking down Fifth Avenue, and I got a call from my agents. I was honestly quite surprised.”
Quinn had a similar experience.
“We spoke about the character, about his ideas for the aesthetic of the film and the themes of family and sacrifice,” he recalls. “And then heard nothing — I say ‘heard nothing’ like I had any expectations. And then had a flabbergasting call from my reps saying that he wanted me to do it.”
That was the only conversation they had before the offer?
“Yeah,” Quinn says, shaking his head. “I don’t believe it either.”
Kirby and Pascal met with Shakman and Marvel executives a few times before their casting was finalized, but none of the actors did so much as a camera test together, let alone meet each other, before Shakman hired them to play a close-knit team.
“I’ve never done that in casting plays either,” Shakman says. “I believe in finding the people who I have an instinct are right for the part.”
Ebon Moss-Bachrach in “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.” Marvel Studios
As Shakman details his casting decisions, he talks about the characters like they’re friends that he’s known for decades — which, in a way, he has. Moss-Bachrach, he says, is “the softest, loveliest human, but with that slightly gruff exterior, a New Yorker through and through — he is Ben Grimm.” Shakman had been impressed with Quinn while working with him on “Game of Thrones,” and thought the actor, who’d just exploded into prominence on “Stranger Things,” would grasp how much Johnny “never really knew who he was before he was the Human Torch and is now like, ‘Who am I? What am I looking for?’”
“He was so knowledgeable about the journey that these characters have all been on as individuals,” Kirby says. “It was really beautiful to talk [with him] about Sue’s journey, what her metaphors were, what her invisibility really means. He cared so much about her.”
Reed was the most challenging role to cast. “He goes from being the nerdy scientist who’s locked away in the lab, to the husband and the father who’d do anything to protect his family, to the guy who’s leading the Avengers,” Shakman says. “I realized that the version we were building had to have all of those elements.”
Shakman’s known Pascal since they were starting out in theater in their 20s and felt the “Last of Us” star could thread that needle. “We had the same talent manager at the beginning of our careers,” Pascal says via email. “We even almost became roommates. Matt has always been a theater animal and would include me in various things he was assembling in the theater community in Los Angeles. Coming together for ‘Fantastic Four’ felt absolutely fated in the stars.”
Even if the individual casting makes sense, though, how could Shakman know they would come together as a believable family? “Great actors create great chemistry,” the director says. “You bring people together, and you build a process that supports the building of that chemistry.”
For “The Fantastic Four,” that process entailed three weeks of rehearsal, during which Shakman workshopped scenes with the core cast and screenwriter Josh Friedman, defining the nature of the relationships between their characters and figuring out how they would exist within the film’s retro-futuristic space age aesthetic. He had the rehearsal room decorated like the 1960s, and had the cast learn period dances. He brought in concept art and archival stills from NASA launches. “We did everything we could to immerse ourselves into the world of the movie,” he says.
“We approached the story dramaturgically as you would a play, before we got on our feet with anything,” Pascal says. “It was Matt setting up the circumstances to be together as a cast and flesh out a language that bonded each of us together as a family.”
Adds Moss-Bachrach, “I don’t think the script was fully ready at the time that we started, so we were sort of workshopping the movie in a way. We were doing a lot of shared research, talking to astronauts and scientists and watching a lot of Apollo footage together.”
Joseph Quinn, director Matt Shakman and Vanessa Kirby on the set of “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.” Jay Maidment / Marvel Studios
At one point, Kirby had questions about Sue’s powers, which include the ability to project force fields as well as turn invisible. “I wanted to understand scientifically what it could possibly be,” she says. “Matt showed me tons of images about refracting light through prisms, and what altering the light of molecules does when you look at it. I enjoyed that so much because it didn’t feel fake. I felt like I could understand it and therefore could act it better because you’re not pretending it’s just like a magic power.”
Shakman says Marvel supported these creative impulses, and he in turn welcomed the studio’s predisposition to vigorously tinker with a movie throughout the filmmaking process. “We definitely made some changes to narrative stuff, but it wasn’t major,” he says. “We were using fine sandpaper the whole time.”
That didn’t mean every change was easy. Shakman cast Malkovich as the Fantastic Four villain the Red Ghost for a sequence at the start of the film, but the actor was cut from the final version. “There was a lot of stuff to balance in this movie, and some things had to go,” he says. “John is one of my favorite humans and one of my biggest inspirations. It was heartbreaking not to include him.”
When Shakman is asked what he’s done for self-care so he can weather the stresses of his first studio movie, he lets out a guffaw. But then he grows quiet for a moment.
“I mean, there’s very little free time, so my time with my family is precious,” he says. “We’ve had an incredibly tough year. We lost everything in the fires.” He was in the middle of his first director’s cut of the film, he explains, when the wildfires in the Pacific Palisades consumed his home. “It’s unfortunately a very common story this year.” A few months later, his mother died; “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” is dedicated to her.
“Being able to work hard on something and be distracted from all those insurance calls and figuring out what the future will hold — it does have its benefits, I will not lie, but yeah, it’s been a lot to juggle,” he says. “But we have each other, and we’re together, and we’re getting through it. That’s where I find my joy — which I think is where these characters do too.”
Suddenly, he points behind him, at a framed photograph from the film of a girl looking up at the sky, and breaks into a smile.
Maisie Shakman in “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.” Marvel Studios
“That’s my daughter,” he says. “That’s Maisie Shakman.” Maisie is featured in a sequence in which the Human Torch swoops in to save a child from falling debris. “She really wanted to do it,” he says. “As a recovered child actor, I was deeply ambivalent about it. But she does gymnastics. She got put on wires, got to fly around. She had the best time.”
Shakman is beaming. He’s not a director in this moment, not the man who assembled Marvel’s First Family. He’s a dad, proud of his kid.
“She did a great job,” he says. “She’s awesome.”
