Joseph Quinn says he and his 'Fantastic Four' co-stars are "All weirdos"

WHILE FILMING Warfare — Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s relentless account of US Navy Seals on a mission in Iraq, which came out last month — it dawned on the actor Joseph Quinn that he wasn’t a rookie any more.

Fellow millennial troopers/troupers Will Poulter, Charles Melton and Cosmo Jarvis had similar epiphanies on set as they witnessed their younger castmates take to it all with a bit more… bounce. “Kit Connor and D’Pharaoh [Woon-A-Tai] were just leaping out of bed in the morning, and the birds were coming in to take the duvets off them, and the deer were coming in to iron their shirts,” the 31-year-old south Londoner tells me over a video call from LA, where he is currently promoting the film. “It was like something out of Snow White.”

The observation brought with it a couple of realisations: 1) “It does age one a little bit when you realise there are now people coming up under you.” 2) “It was a wonderful, profound and challenging experience. Sets are microcultures and social experiments, and this felt like a rare one. In this thing [the film industry], you’re looking for an experience you haven’t had before.”

Quinn says it is exactly this — a variety of experience — that gets him going. Last year, he escaped alien invasion with Lupita Nyong’o in A Quiet Place: Day One and ruled Ancient Rome in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II. He cut his teeth in historical dramas (Catherine the Great), fantasy epics (Game of Thrones) and auteur-led realism (Steve McQueen’s Small Axe), and that was before his life turned upside down playing the heroic Eddie in season four of 1980s sci-fi series Stranger Things.

This summer, he’ll appear in a movie that will push him, once again, into a whole different orbit. Quinn attributes his affinity for extreme world-hopping to being a quasi-only child. “I had step-siblings, but I was between my mum’s and my dad’s, who lived on either side of the Common,” he says, describing his formative neighbourhood of Clapham, not without affection, as a “croissant-crumbed yummy-mummy utopia”.

This semi-solitude was fruitful in its own way. “I think, when you don’t have a sibling like that, you use your imagination. Giving in to fantastical narratives can be hindering but, in the context of being an actor, quite helpful.”

On the flip side, Quinn kept himself grounded through skateboarding, spending his downtime in skateparks. “It’s active, it’s sociable and there’s something so democratic about it,” he says. “You learn so much from it — about pain, about failure, about commitment.” These lessons, he says, apply to a profession in which determination is everything.

“It is competitive,” he says. “Life is competitive. The world is a difficult place to make anything of yourself — increasingly so. It’s impossibly hard.” He’s constantly aware that ”there’s only a small percentage of people who are able to make a living out of acting”.

Quinn attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art on a scholarship, having demonstrated an “aptitude for acting” at school. After graduating in 2015, he bagged a lead role in the BBC drama series Dickensian — a 20-episode Dickens riff — and appeared on stage in London in various productions. He’d be “fucking terrified” of theatre work now, he says, not that he has time to even entertain the idea: he has the Earth — well, an Earth — to save.

In February 2024, Quinn was revealed to have been cast as Johnny Storm, aka Human Torch, in Marvel Studios’ The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the much-anticipated return to the silver screen of some of the comic world’s most charismatic figures, astronauts who gain extraordinary abilities after being exposed to cosmic rays. The career-altering call came when Quinn was on holiday with friends in Croatia; he was shocked, honoured and the rest, and felt that there was “a lot of good juju” in the project.

Instant draws included WandaVision director Matt Shakman’s unique vision and the “exceptional” cast who form his on-screen family: Vanessa Kirby as his sister Susan Storm/Invisible Woman; Pedro Pascal as his brother-in-law Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic; and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as his brother-from-another-mother Ben Grimm/The Thing. Plus, there was the chance to work with his idol John Malkovich (even though, in the end, Malky’s mysterious role only afforded them a single day’s work together).

And, naturally, there was the combustible character himself. Johnny Storm/Human Torch is the charming, self-aware playboy of the bunch, whose powers include fire generation, heat manipulation and pyrokinetic flight; he has previously been portrayed by actors Chris Evans and Michael B Jordan at significant points in their ascents. As the reigning Fantastic Four comic author Ryan North tells Esquire, it was a role that Quinn has just the right “attitude, look and talent” to play. For the actor himself, it was even more straightforward. “Johnny Storm is a funny dude. There was fertile ground,” he says.

Reimagining the Fantastic Four requires particular caution, as Marvel’s first family joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is a dream realised for superhero aficionados. When Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige launched the MCU in 2008, he did so without some of its key figures, including the Fantastic Four, who were stuck — pre-multiverse — at 20th Century Fox (the studio responsible for the three less-than-fantastic films released thus far this century).

Disney’s 2019 acquisition of Fox changed everything, unlocking the quartet and allowing Feige to throw them into his cinematic sandbox. After a six-year wait, the refreshingly distinctive marketing teases a worthwhile pay-off. The Fantastic Four: First Steps — the 37th film in the MCU and the first of its “Phase Six” — takes place in a Sixties-inspired, retro-futuristic world in which the enhanced cohort is something like the Beckhams: a famous family, with each member possessing a unique talent (Cruz is getting into pop now, don’t you know). The semi-origin tale looks likely to explore how the space-racers adjusted to their new abilities and — perhaps more interestingly — are now adapting to stratospheric stardom.

For Johnny Storm, it’s “a combination of feeling quite alienated but also pleased with himself”, says Quinn, who obviously has comparable experience. Though he says people in the public eye complaining about celebrity is “gross”, he admits he’s still getting to grips with the attention, photographs, schadenfreude and the “dissonance of gratitude” that comes with fame. “When the world starts behaving differently towards you, that’s a strange thing. I don’t think it’s ever something you get used to. I personally haven’t, and I don’t think I will.”

Quinn, Kirby, Moss-Bachrach and Pascal are confirmed to reunite in the next Avengers film, due to arrive in May 2026. (“Thankfully, we all get on,” says Quinn. “We’re all weirdos.”) Avengers: Doomsday is Feige’s ambitious move to utilise the fifth most important player in the Four canon, Doctor Doom; in a meta twist, the notorious villain is being depicted by Avengers veteran Robert Downey Jr. “I’m really excited to work with Doom — big RDJ fan — and to see my lovely Fantastic family, and get back in the harness,” Quinn says.

For Quinn, four is continuing to be an auspicious number. His next gig is playing George Harrison in Sam Mendes’ planned quartet of films, one dedicated to each Beatle. Quinn has Liverpudlian credentials: his mother, he informs me, is a “very Scouse lady”, and as a kid he made frequent trips to the northwest. His future bandmates are a roll-call of hot-right-now British and Irish names: Barry Keoghan as Ringo, Harris Dickinson as John and Paul Mescal as, well, Paul. “Serious actors,” says Quinn. He’ll fit right in.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ is out on 25 July.

This story originally appeared on Esquire UK