Paul Rudd and Jonathan Majors’ Improv Skills Were Key to the Scott and Kang Variant Scenes in ‘Ant-Man 3’

variety.com:

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot points, including the ending and the post-credits scenes, for “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” currently playing in theaters.

While improvising in a meticulously crafted Marvel movie — full of CGI, green screens and elaborate costumes — seems nearly impossible, Paul Rudd and Jonathan Majors did just that “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” According to editors Adam Gerstel and Laura Jennings, Rudd, who plays Scott Lang/Ant-Man, and Majors, who plays the MCU’s new Thanos-sized villain Kang the Conquerer, especially exercised their improv muscles during two similar scenes — one which features a multiplied Ant-Man and another, an army of Kangs.

Gerstel says the scene where Lang replicates and faces hoards of his multiple selves was a technical shoot that required the entire sequence to be pre-visualized to understand the story.

The concept was to “showcase Paul’s comedic talents and riff off of that,” wondering how far they could take the scene. Jennings reveals, “When it was a longer sequence, [we had ideas of] little versions of Ant-Man crawling around, but he had to pull back and keep it to the story because it was always about him trying to get to the goal.” Says Gerstel, “Paul recorded an array of facial performances and audio recordings that we put together to work on so we could get things tight.” He adds that being on set watching Rudd in action provided value in the live editing process. “Rudd would improvise.