Jonathan Majors says Idris Elba convinced him to play Kang in the MCU

Jonathan Majors, known for his TV roles in ‘Lovecraft Country’ and Marvel’s ‘Loki’, says he’s often wary of signing on big roles and it was Idris Elba who convinced him to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Elba, of course, is no stranger to the MCU having starred in the franchise in several films as the Agardian deity Heimdall.

The two actors now star together in the upcoming film ‘The Harder They Fall’.

“So many of the things I’m doing or have done I was, in some ways, at a very crucial point in opposition to,” said Majors in an interview with The Ringer, in London, where he’s been filming ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’. “I was not going to do [HBO series] ‘Lovecraft Country’, you know. I thought I was going to do theatre and then I was going to do films and I didn’t want to fall into the trap of being a ‘TV guy.’”

While Majors and Elba were filming ‘The Harder They fall’ together, Majors was given the opportunity to join the Disney Plus series ‘Loki’, as the villainous Kang.

“I had watched the [Marvel] films. Love Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, killed it,” Majors said. “[But] I was like, ‘I don’t think you want me. I don’t think you want what I’m going to do. Like, I don’t think you want that.’ That was my hesitation. I was like, ‘You got the right Black guy?’”

But Elba wasn’t about to let him off easy.

“He’s Idris Elba, you know, he’s a big dog, he’s done it all,” Majors says. “Here comes the youngster coming up, you know, and we were talking about work and the legacy of Black actors and all that stuff. And he said, ‘You can do that.’ What Dwayne Johnson has done to the game, what Idris Elba has done to the game, what Will Smith did to the game. This idea that the Black men can enter into a highly commercial world.”

When it came to the question of taking on Kang the Conqueror or similar blockbuster roles, Elba told Majors: “It’s on you now.”

On the future of his character Kang in the multiverse, Majors said, “It’s common knowledge that Kang has many iterations and he exists in many iterations,” he says. “That’s dope. So I’m reading and reading. Here is an archetype of a person that’s dealing with fate and destiny — and not just his own but others’, and he’s aware of it.”