An Extended Conversation with Kevin Feige

When Kevin Feige sat down with Vanity Fair in his office for a lengthy chat about the last 10 years and the future of Marvel Studios, he was wearing a long-sleeve black polo, a pair of simple jeans, some sneakers, and a black ball cap emblazoned with the Thor: Ragnarok logo. It’s not an unusual uniform for a director or even the occasional studio head, but what’s different about Feige is he wore the exact same clothing, with the simple addition of a blazer, to the glitzy Hollywood premiere of Thor later that same night. As one of his stars, Chris Hemsworth, notes, this is one of the more endearing, down-to-earth qualities of one of the most powerful men in the industry: “The fact that he’ll still have his baseball cap and his sneakers on and a sports jacket thrown over a Marvel or Disney T-shirt. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think he’s just another fanboy.”

That fanboy—who lives in a Pacific Palisades mansion that’s casual, by mansion standards, with his wife of nearly 10 years, Caitlin, and their two kids, Ella and Erik—has worked hard to maintain an air of normalcy, even as his films continue to grow and dominate the globe. (Caitlin Feige, for example, keeps renewing her nursing certification for whenever she wants to return to work.) In the interest of delving deeper into this particular Hollywood outlier, we’ve put together an expanded version of our conversation with Feige, and supplemented it with observations about the studio chief from some of the people who know him best: his Marvel family. Feige started the interview by pointing out a strange, new accessory in the corner of his office—a light-up chair that was a prop from Thor: Ragnarok—and then proceeded to start fake snoring when he, not his movies, became the center of attention.

Vanity Fair: If you could just talk to me a little bit about where you grew up, and when . . .

Kevin Feige: [gentle fake snoring] Born in Boston. I moved to New Jersey when I was three. Lived there until I was 18 and moved here to go to U.S.C. to make movies, which is all I ever wanted to do.

The Russos called you a “content sponge.” When you grew up, you weren’t just into comic books—it was everything?

Comics were not high on there, actually. It was the kind of movies based on comics—like [Richard] Donner’sSuperman. Later, when I was 16, Tim Burton’sBatman came out. But also the Star Wars movies, the Star Trek movies, the Indiana Jones movies, the Back to the Future movies, the Amblin movies. They all could have been based on comics. Those were the types of movies I loved. I always say: “I was at the movie theater on Friday, but I only occasionally went to the comic-book shop on Wednesdays—which was new comic book day.” X-Men was very big at that point. The X-Men comic was very popular, and the other kids would talk about that. So I got into that, and then the animated series came along, which we all remember. But it really was movies and television.

What kind of kid were you? When you went to the movies every Friday night, did you have a whole group of film-loving friends with you?

Yeah. I don’t know if they identified as film lovers, necessarily, but we just would go. I remember the first R-rated movie I saw, which was St. Elmo’s Fire, produced by Lauren Shuler Donner, who I have worked for. I remember them all. I saved ticket stubs. Just as nerdy as you can get. I got so excited the first time I saw the T.H.X. logo in front of The Abyss in ’89 or something. I would drive much further than I had to, to go to the theater that had the sound system I wanted to see the movie— just, you know, a stereotypical film nerd.

But you were rejected from U.S.C. a couple times?

I was rejected from the film school many, many times. I got into the university with the early-admissions first application, beginning of my senior year. The film school—rejection. Five times. Five or six times. I applied every semester, basically, until I got in. There was a point where I thought, “Oh, I’m just not getting in, so I’ll have to go figure out another major.” At no point did I go, ”I have to figure out another career.” I always wanted to keep heading towards movies.

And then you went to go work for Dick and Lauren Shuler Donner. What’s fascinating to me is that even though you grew up idolizing Richard Donner (Superman,Lethal Weapon,The Goonies), when it came time to either work for him, a director, or Lauren, a producer, you chose Lauren.

I interned there a long time, from ’94 to being hired officially the beginning of ’96. In the fall of ’95, I had one more semester of school to get enough credits to graduate and they hired me as a P.A. So I would go to school, and then go in there and work and got paid. I very much liked the notion of having a job before I graduated. That job was walking dogs and getting lunches and washing cars, but it was a job in the film business. I ended up not walking in my graduation ceremony because I was working, which I thought was a good excuse not to go.

Lauren Shuler Donner: He’s smart and caught on quickly and he’s a good guy—a really good guy. You can just tell.

Was there ever a point where you looked at what Lauren did as a producer versus what Dick did as a director and really identified producing as something you wanted to do?

Lauren worked all the time and Dick—there was a lot of downtime. It was between movies for him, and his assistants would do a lot of personal stuff in that downtime. I did a lot of personal stuff for Lauren, too, but she was working more on more movies, going to more sets, and her assistant before me is a guy named Scott Stuber, who now runs Netflix films and was co-chair of Universal, and at that point had just gone from her assistant to, I think, associate producer on Volcano or Free Willy 2. That just seemed like a track to get in the mix on movies.

Were you also changing your definition of what makes a filmmaker? That a producer can be as much of a filmmaker as a director?

Yes, and that was something I saw Lauren do, and then something that I started experiencing myself working with the team on X-Men.

Shuler Donner: We were very similar. There’s a difference between a male producer and a female producer. Women have a little more empathy and intuition. I think he just picked up that style through osmosis. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Kevin has his own instincts and story sense. He somehow innately understood that.

It’s my understanding that your comic-book expertise working with Lauren on X-Men is what impressed Avi Arad and landed you the job at Marvel Studios.

I think that’s true and, also, I had been in touch with Avi for two or three years during the course of the production on X-Men. So I would keep him in the loop of what was going on on set and give him my opinions on things. By that point, I was an expert in all things X-Men in all things Marvel.

Avi Arad: Kevin and I will never not be together in our heads and our hearts.

So since comics weren’t vital to you growing up, at what point did you study them in order to become an expert?

When I started at Marvel, I brushed up on it. A lot of this stuff, because I was a kid growing up in the late 70s and 80s, I absorbed. I knew all the characters. I had all the toys. I had the Underoos. I watched the cartoon series. I couldn’t tell you what happened in what issue, or what was the most famous arc from what artist when I was a kid. It was as I was working on Volcano and You’ve Got Mail—Volcano, by the way, was just featured in the season finale of Rick and Morty, if anybody’s interested.

Paul Rudd: Kevin is a big comedy lover; he likes a lot of really interesting comedy and alternative comedy. The fact that even in Ant-Man,Gregg Turkington was there. Kevin knows about Neil Hamburger and Tim and Eric.

I did watch that.

The dad has a whole runner about Volcano. I thought, “This is so crazy. That movie’s like forgotten.” When I bring that up to Don Cheadle or Tommy Lee Jones, when I would work with them years later, I’d go, “We worked together on Volcano.” They’d go, “Oh, that movie?”

Don’t people talk about Volcano now mostly in the context of Dante’s Peak?

Sure, ridiculous. Two competing volcano movies.

It is interesting to me that you didn’t grow up obsessed with comic books.

I was obsessed with deep mythologies, mainly through Star Wars, and then the West End Games came out with a role-playing game, but didn’t really have the discipline for it. The books were amazing because they went into so much more—a lot of what we know now of Star Wars. You know the fifth character in the background of the cantina scene—you know his name now, you know his backstory now, because of those books. That stuff I always loved, and I was playing with Star Wars figures in the backyard and making my own stories with those. One of my hobbies was to be disappointed with a sequel to a movie, and then make the next version of the movie in my head.

Evangeline Lilly: What I see as the through-line between J.J. Abrams,Peter Jackson, and Kevin Feige is that they are über-fans. He’s still a kid in the sandbox. He’s still playing and remembering that he fantasized about this since he was a little boy, and now he gets to live it up.

Do you have an example of those backyard sequels you created?

After RoboCop 2, I was like, “I gotta fix it. I gotta come up with a better RoboCop 3.” After Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, “I gotta do a better Superman V.” After Star Trek V, “I got a better idea for Star Trek VI.” I did have better ideas for all of them, but nobody was interested. So all of that was not dissimilar to what comics are in terms of that ongoing mythology and that sort of . . .

Expanded universe.

Exactly, right. I bought those in, I think it was ‘91, when Timothy Zahn came out with Heir to the Empire, and it was like a new Star Wars thing. So all of that. It’s just the notion of going to the comic shops and getting baseball cards and keeping the comics in plastic. I didn’t do any of that stuff. It was the interest in the characters.

So when you were working for Avi Arad at Marvel and watching Fox and Sony adapt these films, what were good lessons you learned?

Watching that process on X-Men and X2, in particular, where the budgets were relatively limited and therefore you couldn’t do everything we do nowadays in the films—you had to drill down on the characters and, with Marvel Comics, there’s a great luxury to be able to do that because the depth of character is amazing. A lot of people don’t realize that, including people who are sometimes, or who used to sometimes, be in charge of these movies. You can flip through the artwork, and you either appreciate it or you don’t, but you have to stop and read the entire story and immerse yourself in the story. We keep that lesson nowadays, even when we do have resources to do whatever you want. It doesn’t have to be big. Do it from the character’s point of view instead of as a removed way. Working with Sam Raimi—and when I say “working with,” I say that more as like hanging out and watching.

Sure, “learning from.”

I remember asking him—Spider-Man 2 had finished and it’s one of the best superhero movies ever. I said, “Sam, this turned out pretty well. How do you feel?” And he goes, “Like a deflated balloon.” I remember thinking to myself, “All right, I gotta feel like a deflated balloon after every movie because, if not, you haven’t put everything into it.”

Were there times when you saw Marvel characters adapted and thought, “I would do it differently”?

I don’t want to get too specific about things that we learned that didn’t work, but I think you can look at movies that were made in my seven years from 2000 to 2007, before we started Marvel Studios, and you can see movies that worked and the movies that didn’t work. And the ones that didn’t work, sometimes it was casting, I think, that was misdone. Sometimes, it was projects that were rushed before they were ready. Some of the films in that seven-year period that didn’t work, and I would go, “I know!” We suggested this, but they didn’t listen. We don’t have the control. I hated that.

As all these other studios now are trying to emulate the Marvel model by debuting ambitious slates and franchises from the start. One criticism of them I hear is they should walk before they run. At the same time, I was watching that first Comic-Con appearance you did in 2006. You’re talking about this Hulk movie that’s been somewhat buried in terms of Marvel history and Jon Favreau is there, but Edgar Wright is there, too.

And Jon announced The Mandarin as the villain in Iron Man. I think if we had run, we would have done all those things we said in the panel, which we didn’t. That panel was to say that Marvel’s making movies themselves now, and here’s the information we have.

You had the B sides.

Yeah, the “B-list characters” and all that. That same Comic-Con, I think, that was the L.A. Times or somebody’s headline. I never really thought that because I knew that Iron Man was really cool and Hulk was arguably, next to Spider-Man, the biggest character we had. The goal was deliver these two movies, and make the best Iron Man film we could, and make the best version of Hulk, even coming five years after another version of Hulk.

Mark Ruffalo: [Hulk is] my generation’s Hamlet. Everyone’s gonna get a crack at it before it’s all said and done.

When I was talking to your actors, I asked all of them when they understood the scope of what you had intended. A lot of them mentioned—I think it’s just one conversation that you had in Rome.

Ruffalo mentioned that to me this weekend. I tend to do that a lot: just talk about stuff and presume that people think that, like many film people, that I’m just full of crap. Historically, 99 percent of anything anybody says in Hollywood never actually happens. So I still feel sensitive about that whenever I’m pitching anybody something.

Ruffalo: A lot of studio executives, they have two qualities: they’re either bullshit or super controlling. I never, ever saw those in Feige. I always saw someone that was just—no ego, in a way. There’s something so authentic about him.

So you’re in Rome . . .

The funny thing about that Rome thing is that was the Avengers press tour. They had already been in that movie and I guess it hadn’t been released yet, but it was screening very well and the premieres were going really well. Then, because I’m socially awkward and not very good at talking about the weather or talking about the sports scores, I just talk about what I think we can do next.

Robert Downey Jr.: Let’s not put Kevin in some exalted space, you know. He is the one I think who had to probably have an ice bag on his stomach most nights and just hoping that his best-laid plans would all work out.

Robert was saying that he imagined those years, you must have had an ice pack pressed to your stomach due to anxiety and fear. I want to know when was the moment in all of this empire building that you most needed an ice pack on your stomach.

I think everybody deals with stress in different ways, I mean the truth is, if we just talk about a metaphorical ice pack, there’s a—I don’t think that works, putting ice on your stomach.

I don’t know, yeah.

I’ll try it now.

That’s how Robert keeps so calm.

Casting Captain America was super hard. I started to think, “Are we not going to be able to find Captain America, and if we can’t, what are we going to do with Avengers? Is the whole thing going to fall apart?” And, then, finally opening ourselves up to Chris Evans, who we had initially sort of just looked past because he was Johnny Storm in a Fantastic Four franchise. Then, bringing him in and showing him the artwork, showing him what was happening in this movie, and he took a weekend to decide.

Chris has always seemed like your most reluctant hero—

He’s a reluctant star, but I think he’s become—and I’ve said this to him—for as amazing as all of our actors are at embodying these characters, every single one of them, he’s one that reminds me, alongside Christopher Reeve, as just like “these are the characters.”

I was thinking about that the other day, actually. Anecdotally, even people in my profession who are trained to call actors by their names, not their characters, call him “Cap.” They don’t call Hemsworth “Thor,” but they call Evans “Cap.”

I think he’s a great actor, and I think he can do whatever he wants to do, but even when you look at his Twitter account and taking a stand on things, it’s like, “Is he becoming Captain America?” Which I think is great. People forget that we started filming Avengers before either Thor or Captain America were released. What if people hated Thor? What if people thought Loki was ridiculous? What if people didn’t buy this super soldier frozen in ice? We were in the first quarter of production on a giant movie at that time, and we weren’t going to stop. It was sort of all in at that point.

Related Video: How Marvel Studios Achieves Cinematic Greatness

Scarlett Johansson: Kevin and I are both huge Disney buffs. We’re both Club 33 members. When I found that out about him, and seeing the familiar excitement and inner light that comes from a huge Disney fan speaking about how much they love the whole magical world of Disney, that really speaks a lot to who he is: he’s a kid at heart, in a way. When this studio was sold to Disney, I was like “YES!”

The next seismic thing in the Marvel story is the Disney acquisition. I imagine that you were maybe personally very excited about it. Did you have any qualms about it at the time?

It was pretty amazing, yeah. I think people have qualms about things because they’ve had negative experiences in the past. I never had any experiences with somebody acquiring a company I was working for, and I always had this thing with—movies were always first. Disney theme parks were a close second. That’s what my family did. It was mainly Disney World every year. I had come to California Disneyland a couple of times and, at that time, like Universal Studios was equally exciting because that was movies and making movies.

Sure. Jaws,King Kong.

Exactly. So it was sort of amazing, and in the initial meetings we had with Disney, they were amazing and said, “If it’s not broke, we don’t need to fix it.” They used Pixar as the example. We just always trusted that they would be able to elevate what we were doing and the marketing. We had fine studio partners before that, but we didn’t have a family. As they proved certainly with the Avengers being the first movie that Disney put out, and have proved every year since then—not just on Marvel movies, but all the movies—Disney is the greatest marketing team in the business.

And you’re not just saying that because [Disney publicity V.P.] Ryan [Stankevich] is in the room right now, are you?

I think maybe in the history of the business.

Recently, I’ve seen a shift in the critical community. A lot of critics who were very harsh on the Marvel films, initially, have come around to what you’re doing lately. Does that matter at all to you?

Sure, of course. We have, Ryan knows, we always want those Rotten Tomatoes-certified fresh plaques, right? We’re not going to get many other kinds of awards, but we take great pride in them. I’m always saying, “Ryan, where’s our Rotten Tomato?” Because Rotten Tomatoes are great. They send this little Lucite, certified, fresh thing with the name of the movie on it. We got them lined up around here. We take pride in it. There are cases where audiences and critics are not aligned. But I think, for the most part, they are, and I like it when people like our movies.

A lot of the people I talked to for this piece think that one of the things that really opened up what you were doing in this franchise was the success of Guardians of the Galaxy, in that it’s so different in tone and style and humor.

It had less name value than even the “B-level characters” that we started with.

Can you draw a line from the success of Guardians to hiring people like Taika Waititi or Ryan Coogler? Did it feel like an evolution in the franchise in terms of risks, or experimenting with tone and style?

I wouldn’t draw a line to Taika and Ryan, necessarily, because hiring Favreau and Joe and Anthony Russo and Joss [Whedon], who are now the biggest filmmakers in Hollywood, but at the time were unexpected choices. And, by the way, going back to my experience watching Sony and Laura Ziskin and Avi hire Sam [Raimi], not someone who had just come out with a big, giant blockbuster. He was a filmmaker who’d done super interesting movies on a lesser scale coming into a bigger platform.

We wanted to do a space movie, and we loved the Guardians comics. Just the ridiculous pairing of a tree and a raccoon. It was before Star Wars came back with a vengeance. It was like, “Let’s try a big space movie, the kind of which hasn’t been around for a while.” The audience is following us to these places. The success of Ant-Man and Doctor Strange helped us go, “Hey, the audience is with us,” and Guardians is probably the best example of how far they are willing to go.

Shuler Donner: I’m not surprised—I’m just so proud. When we were developing the X-Men movies, he and I had laid out a plan where the X-Men franchise should go. Fox picked another route. I’m not surprised he kept that aesthetic, and decided he would take the Marvel world and join them together and make five-year plan after five-year plan.

Do you still have aspirations to bring everyone else, like the X-Men, back into the fold?

Well, the problem is whenever I say anything about it, it becomes 15 headlines. So would we like to? Yeah, of course. Is there any movement towards it at all? No. Same thing. Same status.

I don’t think it’s destroying any secrets to say that there are some foundational characters we’ve been with for a very long time who will not be in the franchise anymore after the upcoming Avengers movies. How does thinking about the future of the franchise without those characters make you feel?

It’s inevitable, and I think that’s part of what makes very special events and very special stories. How can you have both an ongoing cinematic universe that continues to make films and a studio that continues to make films and, at the same time, occasionally bring things to a head? Bring something which you’ve never really seen in superhero films is a conclusion—a finale. You’ve seen those in Lord of the Rings films. You’ve seen those in Harry Potter films. You’ve seen those in the Star Wars films.

Logan did a little bit.

Logan did it with one character. But you haven’t necessarily seen it in these kind of movies, and we thought it would be important to bring the current three-phase, 22-movie current series to a conclusion.

On the emotional level, how does it feel knowing you won’t be working anymore with some of these people that almost feel like family?

The thought of not working with them again? I haven’t thought about that very much because we’re such in the thick of it and we have a ways to go. It will be sad. We’ll have to have some sort of a yearly brunch. Or a yearly barbecue. It’s an amazing group that’s been assembled, but I am not one to stop and look back. I am constantly thinking about what’s up ahead and what’s forward and how to keep going forward.

Because of your photo shoot, I did spend a little time going, “Look at that.” It was sort of amazing. What makes me the happiest is seeing how amazed everybody was. These are all very big stars with very big careers and their own lives, and they can do whatever they want, and they were all—like every single one of them was appreciative and amazed to be in the presence of the others. That was one of the first times I was like, “Oh, maybe this is unusual. Maybe this is something that hasn’t happened before.”

Downey Jr.: I feel like, in some ways, he’s been the Captain America who has been calling people to come get behind a shield, so we can actually go do something that feels like this today.

It feels like you’re finally starting to own it with these beautiful offices you opened up to the press in April.

Have you been to Pixar and to Lucasfilm? We have a lobby. I got a chair from a movie, but yes, I know what you mean.

Yeah, it has wheels.

It lights up any color you want.

Chadwick Boseman: There are some very clear things about Feige, that, let me just say it like this: he’s real, he’s real, he’s real. What does that mean? He believes in what he’s doing, and it takes that to do what he’s doing.

What everyone says is that you’re the nicest, most humble kind of guy. But it feels like this is a moment where you’re really owning what you have built.

The moment of this interview and your multiple magazine covers? I guess, yes. The truth is, and everything I was thinking about even during that photo shoot, is we got six more movies to go, not even counting the 5, 10 years beyond that. Nothing is more important than finishing what we started. Joe and Anthony [Russo] are doing Avengers: Infinity War [May 2018] and Avengers 4 [May 2019], the two biggest movies of all time, back to back. I don’t really know if they’re the biggest movies of all time, but two very big movies back to back at the same time. It all feels good. That’s the task at hand.

So we like looking forward, but I am going to look backwards a little bit. You’ve said multiple times that you are happy to see all other comic-book movies succeed because any average audience doesn’t know the difference between DC and Marvel. What was your experience watching Wonder Woman? Did you go opening weekend?

My experience watching Wonder Woman was that I had a great time at the movies. I’m sure it was opening weekend. There are great superhero moments in that movie that I loved. I love the reverse on the Donner Superman alleyway scene where she gets the bullet. I loved the World War I trench where she’s like, “Hey, people are in trouble over there.” [Feige, imitating the naysayers] “Can’t go over there—we’ve been here for a year.” She’s just like [re-enacts Wonder Woman climbing out of the trench] and goes right up into it. That’s a superhero moment, and all the other guys are like, “I guess we gotta follow.” Great. I almost got chills thinking about it. Great.

The larger narrative of Wonder Woman includes a lot of fanfare over there finally being a female-led superhero movie for this new era. Do you wish you guys had gotten there first?

Yeah, I mean, I think everything’s going to work out. I think Captain Marvel is a very different type of movie. I think they have taken the brunt of the “are people going to go see a female superhero movie?” Well, yeah. I think it’s always fun to be first with most things, but I think it will have worked out by the time we’ve gotten our next few movies out.

I know you’re not going to throw anyone under the bus, but when you see other studios struggling to emulate what you’ve built, would you give any advice to them on what makes a good cinematic universe?

The only advice, and I’ve sort of said this already today, is don’t worry about the universe. Worry about the movie. We never set out to build a universe. We set out to make a great ˆIron Man movie, a Hulk movie, a Thor movie, a movie, and then be able to do what, at the time, nobody else was doing: put them together. Bring that experience that hardcore comic readers have had for decades of Spider-Man swinging into the Fantastic Four headquarters, or for Hulk to suddenly come rampaging through the pages of an Iron Man comic. We thought it would be fun for filmgoers to get that same—on a much bigger canvas—rush, because there is something just inherently great about that: seeing characters’ worlds collide with one another.

That’s what is so amazing every day on the set of Infinity War. These characters have no business being in the same room together. It’s ridiculous. Everyone within Marvel Studios just knows the individual movie trumps the overall picture. If there’s a better idea for a movie—if we were going to plant a seed in this movie that was going to be awesome and pay off three movies later, but that seed is not working and that seed is screwing up the movie, goodbye. We’ll do something else later. Make that movie work. The notion of sitting down going, “Let’s build a cinematic universe,” might be a little off. “Let’s sit down and make a great movie and if people are interested in that, there are ways and ideas to tie them together going forward.”

But there are ways in which you have to keep in mind how they’ll knit together on any given production. There are certain things that you have to prescribe—those seeds you mentioned, or seeds that can’t get planted yet because of something you want to do down the road. As the universe gets bigger and more interconnected, have those prescriptions gotten looser? Or, because you have so many other pieces in the air, have they gotten tighter?

It’s the same. One difference is there [are] new filmmakers coming in, [who] inherently understand the notion of the shared sandbox more than the initial filmmakers did, because the sandbox didn’t exist. In certain ways, that dialogue has become easier to have with a broader audience because we have such a library now of characters to pull from who’ve been in other films. The harder part, now, is [incorporating] elements of films that haven’t come out yet, and convincing the filmmaker, “This is going to be cool, but we gotta shoot it now before this.” I always think, sometimes, there’s a healthy level of skepticism. The [Russo] bros take the biggest brunt of this working on these Avengers movies. Panther and Captain Marvel and all this other stuff is in the works while they’re working on it.

Last question. You’re bringing a conclusive end to one chapter, and launching another chapter in space or the quantum realm or wherever you want to go. Do you see a bigger end to all of this?

There [are] a lot of stories to be told from existing characters to characters that we haven’t brought to the screen yet, because there have been immensely talented, creative people creating new stories once a month, every month, every year for the last 50-60 years. It’s pretty amazing, and even if it’s just the kernel of an idea that you can get from the comics and turn it into something else, it’s a treasure trove in those books.

Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Full ScreenPhotos:See Captain America, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man and More in Vanity Fair’s Exclusive Marvel Photo PortfolioSamuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, Danai Gurira as Okoye, Tom Holland as Spider-Man, and Chris Evans as Captain America.Photo: Photographs by Jason Bell; Styled by Jessica Diehl.Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Letitia Wright as Shuri, Karen Gillan as Nebula, and Chris Pratt as Star-Lord.Photo: Photographs by Jason Bell; Styled by Jessica Diehl.Jon Favreau as Happy Hogan, Don Cheadle as War Machine, Vin Diesel as Groot, Dave Bautista as Drax, Paul Bettany as Vision, and Michael Douglas as Dr. Hank Pym.Photo: Photographs by Jason Bell; Styled by Jessica Diehl.Angela Bassett as Ramonda, Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, Anthony Mackie as Falcon, and Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange.Photo: Photographs by Jason Bell; Styled by Jessica Diehl.Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill, Linda Cardellini as Laura Barton, Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie, and Zoe Saldana as Gamora.Photo: Photographs by Jason Bell; Styled by Jessica Diehl.Sebastian Stan as The Winter Soldier, Benedict Wong as Wong, Evangeline Lilly as The Wasp, Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, President of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige, Bradley Cooper as Rocket Raccoon, and Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee.Photo: Photographs by Jason Bell; Styled by Jessica Diehl.Pom Klementieff as Mantis, Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther, Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts, Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, and Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner.Photo: Photographs by Jason Bell; Styled by Jessica Diehl.PreviousNext

Joanna RobinsonJoanna Robinson is a Hollywood writer covering TV and film for VanityFair.com.