Kevin Feige said in the press conference that Marvel’s wish to cast Michelle Pfeiffer goes back to the first “Ant-Man” film, where we saw the original Wasp but not her face:
“I have to say, in terms of the trilogy, the ‘Ant-Man’ trilogy, there is a flashback in the first film to The Wasp, the original Wasp, Janet van Dyne. We don’t see her face. She’s wearing a mask. And it was always our dream that someday we could make another movie and that Michelle Pfeiffer could play that character.”
Pfeiffer’s casting was also a dream of director Peyton Reed’s, who shared in a 2018 interview with The Hollywood Reporter that she was always his top choice for Janet.”We used a double [Hayley Lovitt] on the first movie,” he told THR. “But the whole thing was, ‘I want her to look like Michelle Pfeiffer because that would be my dream casting for Wasp.'” He went on to reveal that they cast Lovitt as a double because she had “really saucer-like, Michelle Pfeiffer eyes.”
The decision to cast Pfeiffer obviously went beyond her aesthetic, though. Pfeiffer gives a gravitas to Janet van Dyne that speaks to her time in the quantum realm and the trauma she suffered there. She’s been through three decades of survival in an unfamiliar, dangerous land full of creatures she’s never seen before. Janet has a darker feel than the rest of her family and sticks out because of it, as she should.
You can check out the further adventures of the buggy superfamily when “Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania” hits theaters on February 17, 2023.