For all those fanboys grousing about Johnny Storm being black in the new Fantastic Four reboot, director Josh Trank has added a new twist to the film’s familial connections, casting actor Reg E. Cathey as Dr. Franklin Storm.
Cathey, best known for stints on shows like “The Wire” and “House of Cards,” will take on the character traditionally depicted in the comics as white. And we’ll have to see exactly what it means that the African-American Cathey is father to a very black Human Torch (Michael B. Jordan) and a lilly white Invisible Girl (Kate Mara).
As speculated by Crave film site Cinema Blend, the casting could mean Sue is an adopted Storm child or that the Storm children’s mother is white (although it still seems highly implausible that any quirk of chromosomes would produce a child that looks like Kate Mara with Cathey as her biological father).
However, in a world where cosmic rays turn a guy in a giant walking pile of rocks, there really doesn’t seem to be much need for deep examination of the implication of biracial genetics, right?
We’ll see how it all plays out when Fantastic Four, also starring Miles Teller, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell and Tim Blake Nelson, hits theaters June 19, 2015.
