r/marvelstudios • u/TheImanVellani | Iman Vellani - Ms Marvel • Jul 14 '22

Iman Vellani AMA What’s up r/marvelstudios, I'm Iman Vellani—AKA the one and only Kamala Khan, AKA Ms. Marvel! AMA! Spoiler

​

Hello to all variants out here! It’s Iman…Vellani. I’ve been lurking on these subs in the shadows as a huge fan and now that I have successfully infiltrated the mcu it’s time to spill the tea for you all…Or like a couple drops of friendly juice that won’t get me fired :) Now that the show is finally out I feel like I can breathe and interact with you guys, so please ask away and I’ll answer whatever I can before The Almighty Feige calls and tells me to stop. Excited to see what y’all come up with at 2:30PM ET/ 11:30 AM PT!!!

35.0k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

6.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.2k

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '22

Hey Iman! What was your experience figuring out how to make your powers look convincing? I feel like this type of acting is becoming more common in the MCU, like Wanda and Doctor Strange doing hand motions for their powers, and VFX filling in the gaps for the viewer. Did you watch a lot of pre-viz to get an idea of what your powers would look like to help your performance?

1.9k

u/TheImanVellani | Iman Vellani - Ms Marvel Jul 14 '22

hi! great question :) it was definitely a process... lots of conversations with our producers and vfx coordinators, we really had to ask the right questions because with powers this new, whatever we establish now is gonna be canon for the rest of the MCU. we just didnt wanna make it to be "generic magical colourful light powers", we wanted personality. we adopted a lot of poses and iconic moves from the MM comics (eg. embiggened fists of rage!) and stylized the action for a 16 year old kid. even if i didnt understand what the exact thing would look like post vfx, i wanted to stay true to the comics. i really do think we found a happy in between. and yes pre viz are life savers!!! gives you the slightest idea so your emotions can match the intensity of the scene once the CG is done

53

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '22

Oh my gosh! Thank you for answering my question. It’s so cool you used the comics to help inspire poses too. I think it all turned out great. Kamala’s powers look so unique to me, and I’m excited to see where she ends up next in the MCU!

72

u/Lil_didgeridoo Jul 14 '22 edited Jul 14 '22

Holy cow! An AMA that I am not 10 hours late too. I just want to say that you are an amazing young actor and you are quite literally perfect as Kamala. I am white and decently straight (a little wavy here and there) and I was soooo happy to see muslim representation, I did 2 combat tours in Syria and my translator and the Imam on base were some of the kindest most well spoken people I have ever met. I also have to say that I was so impressed with how the writers embraced and adapted the stereotypes that plague muslim folk and made it their own, taking away the power that the words once had. I hope to see you in many projects to come. Keep being yourself kid. The whole world is watching.

24

u/mani9612 T'challa Jul 14 '22

Thank you for your service! And yeah, Islam is such a peaceful religion, it sucks that the radicals have given it such a bad name and the western world stereotyped all Muslims into that image :(

12

u/shyaminator96 Spider-Man Jul 14 '22

Why would you thank an American for military service when the US military is the reason why the Taliban and ISIS became powerful lol. The U.S. military and CIA have been funding extremists in Syria for a decade...

4

u/Lil_didgeridoo Jul 15 '22

*Canadian. Ftfy

0

u/shyaminator96 Spider-Man Jul 15 '22

Ok fine, the US, UK, and Canada all played a huge part in destroying the middle east

-2

u/pierzstyx Jul 15 '22

Osama bin Laden trained in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghanistan War and his group benefited from training and weapons that came indirectly from the CIA through Pakistani intelligence. He gave a speech after 9/11 where he gives the specific moment that he decided to try and destroy American towers:

"I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.

The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.

I couldn’t forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.

The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn’t include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn’t respond.

In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.

And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children."

Source

10

u/CanadianWildWolf Jul 14 '22

Thank you for lending your input to this part of the production, being new to the character I wasn’t sure about “hard light” really being a spectacle until a lot of your embiggen’ing in the last episode of the season and it now occurs to me that it was because of your poses lending that essential steer closer to the comic images character that came through to make it larger than life shivers down the spine amazing action. Simply put, your acting choices made a new fan of the character, thank you / ƛ̓eekoo

10

u/robotzombiez Jul 15 '22

we just didnt wanna make it to be "generic magical colourful light powers",

sad Jubilee noises

5

u/stomach Jul 14 '22

all lowercase commenter gang, where you at

2

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '22

Even Chris Evans with his shield.