Movies

Mark Millar Wants Tessa Thompson To Be The New Kick-Ass

Tessa Thompson Kick-Ass
By Ben Pearson/

Netflix bought comic writer Mark Millar's Millarworld company last summer, but two Millar properties were not included in that deal: Kingsman (which saw a movie sequel released last year) and Kick-Ass. The latter is getting a new monthly comic series in 2018 with a brand new protagonist: the mantle of Kick-Ass will pass from Dave Lizewski to Patience Lee, a black woman who served in the military and is the mother of young children.

Now Millar says that if he could pick an actor to take over the Kick-Ass mantle from Aaron Taylor-Johnson, he'd choose Thor: Ragnarok star Tessa Thompson to play Patience Lee in a new movie. Read the writer's Tessa Thompson Kick-Ass comment below.

Before we go any further, one thing absolutely must be pointed out: Millar loves to talk. I've lost count of the number of news articles his comments have generated over the years (conservative guess: 22 million), but he's one of those guys with a big personality and strong ties to the world of comics and pop culture, so he has a large and captive audience. The point is, a lot of what he says never comes to fruition, or shouldn't be taken too seriously. So this is your warning to take what he says here with the requisite grain of salt.

When a fan suggested Dirk Gently actress Jade Eshete, Millar expounded more on why he thinks Thompson is the best fit for the part:

He also pointed out in a separate tweet that she's the same age as Patience Lee: both are 34 years old. (Not that a few years' age difference has ever been a particularly difficult obstacle for Hollywood to overcome, but this just seems to further cement his preference.)

To be clear, another Kick-Ass movie is not even officially in the works yet (as far as we know), so this is little more than dream casting. But I'll give him this: in terms of dream casting, you can't get much better than Tessa Thompson. The actress seems to be on everybody's radar after her performance as Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok, but she's been a TV mainstay for years, popping up in shows as varied as Veronica Mars, Grey's Anatomy, Heroes, and Westworld. She's also done terrific work in films like Dear White People and Creed. Millar's right when he says she's got range, so I don't doubt for a second that Thompson would be capable of playing Patience Lee if the stars align and that's something she's interested in.

In a new EW article explaining a bit more about the character, Millar hinted that a new adaptation of Kick-Ass (should it ever get made) might end up on the small screen instead of in movie theaters:

[Kick-Ass director] Matthew Vaughn went nuts for this when I sent him the first few issues a few weeks back, though he said it feels more like a great TV show than a movie series, and I think he's right. You couldn't do this in TV when we did the first Kick-Ass, but you absolutely could now, of course.

We'll have to wait and see how Thompson reacts, and whether this is just another of Millar's statements that drifts away into the ether or if it actually results in a tangible piece of entertainment that we can watch. In the meantime, the first issue of the new Kick-Ass comic with protagonist Patience Lee debuts on February 14, 2018.

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