• Malkovich brief glimpse leads to speculation
  • Would be the Red Ghost’s first live action appearance
  • Could the Super-Apes follow?
Does John Malkovich play the Red Ghost in The Fantastic Four: First Steps?
Does John Malkovich play the Red Ghost in The Fantastic Four: First Steps? Credit: Marvel/YouTube

Anticipation is building around The Fantastic Four: First Steps, as the new trailer teases and tantalizes. This retro-futuristic movie brings Marvel’s First Family back into action.

The blue-suited superheroes have created quite the buzz, with MCU fans eager to know who the villains will be in the latest adventure.

Read more: All we know about The Fantastic Four: First Steps

We already know that the cosmic entity Galactus features in the film, with the voice provided by star of hit series The Bear, Ralph Ineson. Natasha Lyonne, Paul Walter Hauser, and John Malkovich have also also been cast, but their roles remain a mystery.

However, the trailer shows a brief glimpse of a haggard and bearded looking Malkovich, which naturally is leading to lots of speculation.

Does Malkovich play the Red Ghost?

It’s been strongly rumored that Hauser plays the Mole Man and Lyonne the talented, blind sculptor Alicia Masters. This led to fans suggesting that Malkovich would be playing her supervillain stepfather, the Puppet Master. 

This theory appears to have been debunked, as Malkovich is seen in the trailer with long white hair, while The Puppet Master has always been portrayed as a bald character.

Fans have been quick to point out that Malkovich actually resembles another classic, yet more obscure MCU villain, the Red Ghost. 

If Malkovich is indeed playing the Red Ghost, it will bring the Fantastic Four’s oldest and strangest supervillain to live-action for the first time. 

The Red Ghost first appeared in the comic Fantastic Four #13 in 1963. He was originally a Russian scientist named Ivan Kragoff who was hell bent on beating the Americans to the moon. Through an irradiation experiment, he gained the ability to mentally control animals and started an army.

The Red Ghost and the Super-Apes

Kragnoff irradiated hundreds of apes. They were trained to be obedient and follow his verbal commands. He called them his Super-Apes and they included the gorilla Miklho, the orangutan Peotor and Igor the baboon. 

These three primates would stick with Kragnoff and through further cosmic ray experiments would become just as powerful as The Fantastic Four. Miklho gained super-strength, Peotor the power over magnetism, and Igor gained shapeshifting abilities.

We may be jumping the gun a little, but if we do see the Red Ghost, then there’s every chance we may be one step closer to seeing the Super-Apes come to life in the MCU too. After all, the Red Ghost and his primates almost always appeared together as foursome.

Monkeys aside, Malkovich playing the Red Ghost certainly seems plausible, given his past roles as Russian characters. He portrayed Russian mobster Teddy in the 1998 film Rounders and the cruel Colonel Pavlov in the 2008 Russian-British drama In Tranzit.

Seeing him portray the evil Red Ghost would be a sure-shot crowd pleaser with the die-hard MCU fans. But we’ll just have to see…

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Harvey Aspell
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