It’s an unfortunate inevitability for anything wildly popular that it will eventually be sniffed at. So has been the case for the superhero movie in the last few years. Still enormous by most metrics, the lustre of many recent ones has been dimmed by audience fatigue and middling reviews compared to their 2010s heyday. But if anyone can convince you that these fantastical blockbusters are not just exciting but downright relevant in 2025, it could well be Vanessa Kirby.
This month Kirby takes on the role of Sue Storm – the Invisible Woman – in Marvel’s Fantastic Four: First Steps. She is joined by on-screen husband and man-of-the-moment Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards/Mr Fantastic), Joseph Quinn as her brother Johnny Storm/Human Torch and The Bear scene-stealer Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who takes on the part of Ben Grimm/The Thing. It’s a killer cast and a stylish proposition: director Matt Shakman has leant into a retro-futuristic vibe inspired by the 1960s comic-book origins of Marvel’s First Family.
Buzz was high from the beginning. When Pascal posted a selfie of the four on Instagram in 2024, it went viral, with over a million likes.
Kirby is moved by the intensity of the fandom and has ‘a deep appreciation of how these big stories really affect people globally’. She looked back to the ’60s comics as she prepared for the role. ‘I came to appreciate that Marvel at the time was really counterculture,’ she says on a blistering hot day, having just wrapped a day filming for Avengers: Doomsday (out next year) at Pinewood. ‘Because it was [about] this group of misfits really, who were just trying to work out how not to be weird. I think that kind of tapped into how most people feel a lot of the time.’
Superpowers aside, Kirby – who is a warm and generous conversationalist – talks about wanting to find the universal, very human, narrative in the story. What we do as people when we ‘have faced our biggest challenges. How do we overcome them? It could be grief, doubt, or it could be whatever.’
Noo, as her friends know her, is a master at teasing out the vulnerability and intimacy in her characters, be that Josephine Bonaparte in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon or an arms dealer in the Mission Impossible franchise. In her breakout role, as Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of The Crown, she found a tenderness in a woman who could easily have been played as a one-note brat. Impossible to pigeonhole, she is as magnetic on stage (in Chekhov, or in A Streetcar Named Desire) as she in on screen – her Oscar-nominated turn in Pieces Of A Woman, as a woman who loses her baby in childbirth, was devastating.
Those heavier roles required her to access pain. ‘I’ve had incredibly deep and fulfilling creative experiences. But if the material is really hard you have to go there, and you have to live in it for a while,’ she says. For a long time, she realised, that’s what she’d been doing and welcomed a gear shift with Fantastic Four. ‘Sue is a very positive person, so it was really nice to feel that for a while’.
There’s still nuance to the role. ‘I liked her because she wasn’t just a strong superhero lady,’ she says. ‘She has a difficult relationship with Reed sometimes and she gets annoyed with her brother, and she’s trying to manage everything. I loved that about her’.
Something else she was drawn to was the fact that Storm is pregnant, which added an unexpected dynamic. In a piece of symmetrical plotting, Kirby herself is pregnant with her first child, with her lacrosse player partner Paul Rabil. ‘It’s surreal because Sue is a first-time mother and we had to explore so many things about that in depth. So it was uncanny that this happened at the same time. I feel so grateful to her and close to her because I learned so much from her without even realising it’.
Every woman I know has expressed fear around not being able to work and also be a mother.
Working full pelt while pregnant has been enlightening. Kirby salutes her stylist, Andrew Mukamal (who also worked with Margot Robbie on the viral Barbie press tour) for his flexibility (‘He’s had to adjust all his incredible ideas; he’s been so supportive and wonderful’) and lavishes praise on her Marvel family for their support.
‘Being on Avengers with all these guys, they’ve just been so kind… it’s been a complete pleasure’ she says, adding, ‘I think every woman I know has expressed fear around not being able to work and also be a mother. I was very nervous. [But] that’s old modelling for women. It’s an incredible thing that women do. I’ve been really moved by learning that there’s an ability to do both’.
Kirby is genuinely close to her Fantastic Four family, the bond ‘instant, and the synergy was just exactly right. We just clicked. You can act it, but you can’t manufacture it, you can’t really fake that. We all had such a laugh and now are very, very much bonded as a family. I mean, Joe really feels like my brother, Evan feels like my best friend and Pedro is, you know, the most beautiful scene partner I could hope for, really.’
Ahh, yes, Pedro Pascal. The internet’s boyfriend, the global crush, the demographic-defying Dream Man. So, why is everyone in love with Pascal?
‘Everyone!’ she laughs. ‘We all have our theories. Mine is because he’s so unapologetically him. He’s not guarded at all,’ she says. ‘He just can’t help but be himself. And I think people are so drawn to someone who doesn’t have any armour up, and it makes him really vulnerable. But I think vulnerability is so brave and you can’t help but trust it, you just feel it’s real.’
Like Pascal, Kirby started out in theatre. After graduating from Exeter University with a BA in English literature she turned down a place at LAMDA to do rep theatre in Bolton. They were, she says, ‘some of the happiest times of my whole life. You’re not caring about whether you’re well-known or not, you just want to do the play. I don’t think that leaves you’.
It was 10 years ago that Kirby, now 37, was cast in The Crown – the role that catapulted her to a different level of fame. ‘If you have a really fast assent in your twenties I can’t imagine how challenging that must be.’ There is a humility to her that is refreshing, a recurrent sense that she knows what a fortunate position she finds herself in. Through grind comes gratitude. ‘You know what it is to do 500 auditions a year and get two of them. You get it and you don’t take it for granted – I know I don’t.’
Raised in Wimbledon, Kirby and her siblings were nourished creatively. Her family wasn’t thespy (her father was a surgeon, her mother a magazine editor) but, ‘[I was] brought up going to a ton of theatre, not necessarily in the flashy places,’ she says. Kirby credits her sometimes ‘quite old-school’ tastes with the fact that her father would always insist on watching an old movie before he’d put on a new one.
Was there ever a plan B? Not exactly, but Kirby has found meaning beyond her career. She travelled in Africa on a gap year, volunteering at an AIDS hospice. She now works closely with War Child and has volunteered at refugee camps in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine. ‘Their work is far more meaningful than me putting on a wig and an accent,’ she says. ‘There are people doing far more important jobs than us, it’s just ours happens to be public. You have to take it for what it is, be grateful that you’re working and try to remain relaxed about it’.
Actual relaxation might be off the cards for a little while, however. In between the baby and filming, she has a production company, Aluna Entertainment, which she set up with her sister Juliet and ex-Film 4 exec Lauren Dark. ‘It takes a long time to build a slate, you have to put teams together and find directors and writers and put them all together on one project until, finally, it’s ready to announce. It takes quite a long time, but it’s been such a fulfilling journey’. Their first film, the thriller Night Always Comes, lands on Netflix later this year.
But, first, there’s the international publicity juggernaut for Fantastic Four. Despite her claims not to be very good at red carpet razzmatazz (the pictures of her in second-skin, major sass Alaïa, looking every inch the bombshell, suggest otherwise), this time she is looking forward to it. It means being reunited with her on-screen family. ‘We had such a good time, I’m just so excited to share that with everybody’.
‘Fantastic Four: First Steps’ is in cinemas 25 July