While some still know him best for playing Bernard the elf in the first two Santa Clause movies and The Santa Clauses TV series, David Krumholtz has assembled many other notable roles over his career, including Charlie Epps in Numb3rs and Isidor Isaac Rabi in Oppenheimer. Alas, his campaigning to play Benjamin Grimm, a.k.a. The Thing, in the MCU’s The Fantastic Four reboot didn’t work out. The good news, though, is now Krumholtz has a backup role in mind that’s still tied to Marvel’s First Family.
In case you missed it, Marvel Studios revealed its core Fantastic Four cast last week, and The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach was selected to play The Thing in the upcoming Marvel movie opposite Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm/Invisible Woman and Joseph Quinn’s Johnny Storm/Human Torch. As Krumholtz explained to EW, expressing his desire to play the rocky powerhouse on social media was enough to land him a meeting with director Matt Shakman, where he enthusiastically pitched himself for the role. He recalled:
It's been a big, sort of unabashedly craven goal of mine to be part of the MCU in some way. I met [director] Matt Shakman for Ben Grimm. I only met him on the strength of a Twitter post or an Instagram post that I then took down two hours after I posted it. I was embarrassed. My post said, ‘I just want to be in the conversation.’ And it was a picture of the Thing, and Matt saw it somehow. And I had a meeting with him and we discussed it. And I've never been so bold in a meeting before, just begging for the role, just straight up selling the shit out of it, the idea of how committed and passionate I was for it. But obviously that didn't happen.
David Krumholtz detailed in the interview how he “grew up reading Marvel comics,” to the point that it became an “obsession.” So the actor found it “mind-blowing” when Marvel started making movies, making it understandable why he’s been wanting to get in on that MCU action for a while. While playing The Thing didn’t work out, Krumholtz described Ebon Moss-Bachrach as “a really great choice” and admitted it “makes way more sense in some ways.”
So with The Thing no longer in the cards, Krumholtz is now redirecting his energy towards playing Harvey Rupert Elder, a.k.a. Mole Man, the first supervillain the Fantastic Four ever fought. Though that’s not to say he isn’t game to play any other character in the MCU, with Krumholtz saying:
I mean, it's a shoe-in for Mole Man, isn't it? But I don't know. I'll do anything Marvel tells me to. I'll probably end up playing like a superhero's therapist. Let's face it. There's slim pickings for guys like me in that world, unfortunately. I'm old and I'm not in any kind of acceptable shape. So we'll see how that works out, if it works out at all.
Although it’s been naturally assumed that the superhero team’s arch-nemesis, Doctor Doom, will be featured in The Fantastic Four (Ben Mendelsohn would like to be recast in that role), that doesn’t necessarily guarantee he’ll be the reboot’s main villain. It’s worth pointing out that a drastically-tweaked version of the character named Harvey Allen was played by Tim Blake Nelson in 2015’s Fantastic Four, but this character never became a supervillain, instead being depicted as Baxter Foundation’s supervisor who was murdered by Toby Kebbell’s Doom. In other words, Mole Man has yet to be properly adapted in live-action, so using him as the driving threat would be a good way for The Fantastic Four to stand out from the previous movies, whether David Krumholtz is playing him or not.
The Fantastic Four is due in theaters on July 25, 2025, and both 2005’s Fantastic Four and its sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer can be viewed with a Disney+ subscription. David Krumholtz’s next movie, Lousy Carter, hits theaters and on-demand March 29, and his performance in Oppenheimer can now be streamed with a Peacock subscription.
