Proud Marvel Super Fan, Iman Vellani, Stars in ‘Ms. Marvel’

Iman Vellani, star of the Disney+ series "Ms. Marvel," poses for a portrait, Thursday, June 2, 2022, at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP)
Iman Vellani, star of the Disney+ series "Ms. Marvel," poses for a portrait, Thursday, June 2, 2022, at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP)
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Proud Marvel Super Fan, Iman Vellani, Stars in ‘Ms. Marvel’

Iman Vellani, star of the Disney+ series "Ms. Marvel," poses for a portrait, Thursday, June 2, 2022, at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP)
Iman Vellani, star of the Disney+ series "Ms. Marvel," poses for a portrait, Thursday, June 2, 2022, at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP)

Iman Vellani, who stars as Kamala Khan in the new Disney+ series “Ms. Marvel,” has a conundrum. Now that she’s a part of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), does she remove the Marvel posters from the walls of her childhood bedroom or leave them up?

“Brie (Larson) is on my wall and she’s in my phone book. So, like, that’s weird,” said Vellani in a recent interview.

“Ms. Marvel,” debuting Wednesday, is 19-year-old Vellani’s first professional acting job. Already an avid reader of the comics, Vellani learned of the open audition from her aunt. She went to the audition. Lo and behold, Vellani got the job.

The first month on set was spent in prep, rehearsing and stunt training. She had to give up her high school diet of McDonald’s and Oreos and build stamina, but Vellani wasn’t interested in changing her shape too much. “I was 17. Kamala was 16. I wanted her to look like a normal high school kid,” she said.

“My first proper day of filming — that was intense,” said Vellani. “It was all of the stunts that I had to do in the real Captain Marvel suit. The one that Brie gets to wear. It was an extremely uncomfortable day. That suit is not made to move in. You’re just supposed to stand and walk like a mannequin, and that’s what it’s made for. There’s so many pieces and it’s just really uncomfortable, and the scenes were pretty intense. So I came home with all these bruises and everything. My mom was like, ‘Oh my God, what happened?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m a superhero. That’s what happened.’”

Vellani just may be the first Marvel actor who is also a massive fan. She especially loves Robert Downey, Jr. and has proudly re-watched “Iron Man” “more than the average person.”

“They really are just a projection of real life and make you feel like you’re a part of something. Isn’t that what we all kind of want, to feel like we belong? And I know it sounds super cheesy, but for the Marvel fandom, it’s comfortable. It’s what we know. We can recite everything under the sun about the MCU.”

Sana Amanat, the co-creator of “Ms. Marvel,” jokes that having an actor who is a stan (or, really big fan) as they say, has its challenges.

“Sometimes she would just pull up in the producer’s chair next to me and just give lots of thoughts and opinions on, you know, either the show or the rest of the MCU. And I’d be like, ’That’s cool, but I need you to just act right now,” she laughed, adding, “Iman brought so much life and love to the character and it just made the entire process so much easier.”

Vellani was browsing a local comic book store when she discovered the “Ms. Marvel” comics and immediately felt represented in a way that is not common in mainstream media.

“I saw a girl who looked like me. She was Muslim and Pakistani and a superhero fanatic and I was Muslim, Pakistani and a superhero fanatic, so it worked out quite well. And I think my favorite part about the comic books was that it wasn’t about her religion or her culture or her ethnicity, it was about a fanfic-writing nerd, who just so happened to be Pakistani and just so happened to be Muslim. Those parts of her life motivated her and drove her as a character. she used her religion as a moral code. .. She never neglected her culture. It was something that kind of uplifted her journey.”

One of the things about South Asian culture that Vellani says “Ms. Marvel” gets right, is the importance of family. Kamala’s parents and brother feature prominently in the series.

“Showing those close, tight-knit family relationships, showing parents that are alive in the MCU, how rare is that,” said Vellani. “We wanted to hopefully get the ball rolling on Muslim representation in the media because there’s 2 billion Muslims and South Asians in the world, and we cannot represent every single one of them. But I do hope that people find some sort of comfort in Kamala’s character or through her brother or her parents or anyone in her community.”

Vellani is not only thrilled to represent in the MCU but also to be entrusted with its secrets.

“It’s an honor to keep these secrets. For some people, power is money. For Marvel fans, it’s knowledge and secrets and all the inside scoop on all the movies that haven’t been released yet. I have it. I have that power and I love it.”



Tim Burton Talks about His Dread of AI as an Exhibition of His Work Opens in London

 A member of staff poses at The World of Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum, in London, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP)
A member of staff poses at The World of Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum, in London, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP)
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Tim Burton Talks about His Dread of AI as an Exhibition of His Work Opens in London

 A member of staff poses at The World of Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum, in London, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP)
A member of staff poses at The World of Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum, in London, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP)

The imagination of Tim Burton has produced ghosts and ghouls, Martians, monsters and misfits – all on display at an exhibition that is opening in London just in time for Halloween.

But you know what really scares him? Artificial intelligence.

Burton said Wednesday that seeing a website that had used AI to blend his drawings with Disney characters “really disturbed me.”

“It wasn’t an intellectual thought — it was just an internal, visceral feeling,” Burton told reporters during a preview of “The World of Tim Burton” exhibition at London’s Design Museum. “I looked at those things and I thought, ‘Some of these are pretty good.’ ... (But) it gave me a weird sort of scary feeling inside.”

Burton said he thinks AI is unstoppable, because “once you can do it, people will do it.” But he scoffed when asked if he’d use the technology in this work.

“To take over the world?” he laughed.

The exhibition reveals Burton to be an analogue artist, who started off as a child in the 1960s experimenting with paints and colored pencils in his suburban Californian home.

“I wasn’t, early on, a very verbal person,” Burton said. “Drawing was a way of expressing myself.”

Decades later, after films including “Edward Scissorhands,” “Batman,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Beetlejuice,” his ideas still begin with drawing. The exhibition includes 600 items from movie studio collections and Burton's personal archive, and traces those ideas as they advance from sketches through collaboration with set, production and costume designers on the way to the big screen.

London is the exhibition’s final stop on a decade-long tour of 14 cities in 11 countries. It has been reconfigured and expanded with 90 new objects for its run in the British capital, where Burton has lived for a quarter century.

The show includes early drawings and oddities, including a competition-winning “crush litter” sign a teenage Burton designed for Burbank garbage trucks. There’s also a recreation of Burton’s studio, down to the trays of paints and “Curse of Frankenstein” mug full of pencils.

Alongside hundreds of drawings, there are props, puppets, set designs and iconic costumes, including Johnny Depp’s “Edward Scissorhands” talons and the black latex Catwoman costume worn by Michelle Pfeiffer in “Batman.”

“We had very generous access to Tim’s archive in London, stuffed full of thousands of drawings, storyboards from stop-motion films, sketches, character notes, poems,” said exhibition curator Maria McLintock. “And how to synthesize such a wide ranging and meandering career within one exhibition was a fun challenge — but definitely a challenge.”

Seeing it has not been a wholly fun experience for Burton, who said he’s unable to look too closely at the items on display.

“It’s like seeing your dirty laundry put on the walls,” he said. “It’s quite amazing. It’s a bit overwhelming.”

Burton, whose long-awaited horror-comedy sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” opened at the Venice Film Festival in August, is currently filming the second series of Netflix’ Addams Family-themed series “Wednesday.”

These days he is a major Hollywood director whose American gothic style has spawned an adjective – “Burtoneqsue.” But he still feels like an outsider.

“Once you feel that way, it never leaves you,” he said.

“Each film I did was a struggle,” he added, noting that early films like “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” from 1985 and “Beetlejuice” in 1988 received some negative reviews. “It seems like it was a pleasant, fine, easy journey, but each one leaves its emotional scars.”

McLintock said Burton “is a deeply emotional filmmaker."

“I think that’s what drew me to his films as a child,” she said. "He really celebrates the misunderstood outcast, the benevolent monster. So it’s been quite a weird but fun experience spending so much time in his brain and his creative process.

“His films are often called dark,” she added. “I don’t agree with that. And if they are dark, there’s a very much a kind of hope in the darkness. You always want to hang out in the darkness in his films.”