It doesn’t take much to get fans speculating about who the next big name to join the ever growing MCU participants list is going to be, and a small piece of casting news on the Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania production has Bill Murray fans believing that the Ghostbusters: Afterlife star will be appearing in the upcoming Marvel movie. Of course, there is a lot of love in the world for Bill Murray and everything he appears in, so even the hint of him joining the MCU comes with a surge of excitement across the internet as a result.
A Pre-SNL Bill Murray played The Human Torch in the Fantastic Four Radio Show back in 1975. I was a fan. Years later, at the GROUNDHOG DAY junket, he signed this for me.
Happy Groundhog Day! pic.twitter.com/m2sUrhTPzc
— Peyton Reed (@MrPeytonReed) February 2, 2021
As well as reprising his role as Peter Venkman in Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Bill Murrayhas recently appeared in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and is set to appear in a new untitled project with the direct, and is also listed to appear in the movie Asteroid City and the TV series The Now, so could he be about to add the Ant-Man threequel to his list of upcoming roles? Well, here is where the rumors have stemmed from.
The source of the rumor appears to be a blink and you miss it moment, when an eagle-eyed movie buff noticed that English actor John Townsend has been cast in something called Dust Bunny. For those that don’t know, that is the production name of the new Marvel adventure for Scott Lang and co. What makes the casting more interesting, is that Townsend is listed as Bill Murray’s photo double. Unlike a stunt double, who is brought in to take on the action sequences and dangerous parts of filming that the main actor may not want, or be able, to perform, a photo double functions as a background actor and appears in shots where the actor is out of focus or in the back of a scene with their back to the camera. For these purposes, the photo double should be roughly the same height, build and be as close to the actor in appearance. It could be argues that in the shots available of him, Townsend wouldn’t be mistaken for Murray in the street, but in the back of a scene he would probably fit the part.
That information on its own is more than enough to pitch the idea of Murray’s involvement on Quantumania with reasonable belief in it being true, but just to add a little more weight is the fact that the movie’s director Peyton Reed is a huge fan of Murray’s and back in February he celebrated Groundhog Day with a Tweet that detailed Murray’s past Marvel experience as the voice of the Human Torch in a 1975 radio show based on the Fantastic Four.
Again, a lot of coincidental material, but rumors have been proved to be true from a much rockier foundation than this. For now, the information should be seen as a “Scene we would like to see”, but with the production of the movie being well underway in the U.K. we will likely not have to wait too long to find out if it holds any real merit.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is known to feature returning MCU veterans Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer, as well as bringing back Jonathan Majors as another, more dangerous incarnation of Kang the Conqueror. The film arrives towards the end of Marvel’s Phase Four slate, launching in theaters on February 17th, 2023. This news comes out The Cosmic Circus.