The year 2018 was a pretty big one for Hannah John-Kamen. Apart from her role as F'Nale Zandor in "Ready Player One," she also played a very different type of antagonist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movie "Ant-Man and the Wasp."
John-Kamen's Ava "Ghost" Starr is a formidable enemy with dangerous and highly combat-effective phasing powers, and her suit and unnerving after-images give her a uniquely creepy look. Nevertheless, she's largely an antagonist out of necessity, and her desperate mission to stabilize her "molecular disequiblirium" before it kills her requires her to go through Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) — sometimes literally.
Ghost is a male character in the comics, and in an exclusive interview with Slashfilm ahead of the film's premiere, John-Kamen enthused about the opportunity to bring a female version of the antagonist onscreen. "I think that the kind of gender-swapping from male to female is, you look at graphic novels, you can look at comic books written so long ago," she said. "And they're like 50 years old or 40 years old. And it's nice to like go, 'Do you know what? This is a modern world.' It's, again, freeing, to be able to take that character and go, 'Yeah, that can be played by a male or female,' and that's definitely forward-thinking. And that's been amazing to be able to do."
