WARNING: Mild spoilers ahead for “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”
The multiversal door has been kicked open in the MCU, and Kang the Conqueror isn’t the only one with a bunch of variants to worry about. In “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” Scott Lang also finds himself in a room full of, well, himself. And according to Paul Rudd, it was singlehandedly “the most complex thing” he’s ever had to do.
Thanks to a few brief shots in the early trailers for the film, we knew that Scott Lang would eventually come face to face with himself, and a giant version of himself and, somehow, a pile of himself. None of it really made any sense, but that’s to be expected with the Quantum Realm. But now, we know.
As part of his efforts to escape the Quantum Realm, Scott shrinks even smaller, and finds himself in what essentially amounts to a pocket dimension. He’s warned that his sanity will be tested there, but he doesn’t fully know what that means, until he suddenly starts splitting off into new versions of himself. They’re only “possibilities” — variants of what he could’ve been — but there are a lot of them. So we had to ask Paul Rudd: what’s it like working with a room full of Paul Rudds?
“That was the most complex thing I’ve ever had to do ever in my life, in anything I’ve ever filmed,” he told TheWrap with a laugh. “It took so many weeks to shoot that sequence. And it’s fascinating, honestly, to talk to the special effects people, and the things that they have to kind of take into account and the things that I learned.”
He continued, “Doing that sequence was really, really interesting. I’d had a little bit of experience playing opposite myself in that show ‘Living With Yourself,’ so I knew [how] to kind of play a clone or like, have a conversation with myself. But this was that times, you know, 1000. Literally. So yeah, it was a bit arduous. But also kind of exciting, because, you know, it was new, I’d never done anything quite like that.”
And if you’re wondering, yes, most of it was done practically. Obviously it’d be impossible to bury Paul Rudd under a pile of Paul Rudds, and then have him climb up a bunch of versions of himself. But he definitely did climb a real structure, and did have real Ant-Man hands to grab onto.
“I was climbing this kind of, it was almost like a three-story jungle gym. And there were people in all blue suits — like, a blue screen around us and they were in blue suits — and the stunt guys, they’re lifting me up, and I’m having to climb around them,” Rudd explained.
“And so I was working with a lot of people in that, and you kind of can’t fake it. You really do need other people to do it. And then there was another stunt guy who had an Ant-Man suit that, if I needed to grab a hand, you’d see the glove and so yeah, there were a lot of moving parts, literally.”
You can watch TheWrap’s full interview with Paul Rudd in the video above.
“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is now in theaters.