Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania was not a classic, part of a number of missteps in the Marvel Cinematic Universe over the past couple of years which will hopefully receive some course correction with the studio's slate of 2025 releases. But there were some things to enjoy in it, and chief amongst those was the surprise of seeing indie-rock don E, frontman and leader of Eels, crop up in a cameo near the film’s beginning, asking Ant-Man/Scott Lang, played by Paul Rudd, to take a picture with his dog. Speaking to this writer earlier this year, E, aka Mark Oliver Everett, looked back on the experience.
“It was fun,” he said. “It took two days to just shoot that scene, that’s how intense those movies are. I was there for two days. It was really fun. I’ve acted with Paul Rudd before and it was great to see him again.”
E had previously appeared in the Rudd comedy This Is 40 and said the actor is a huge Eels fan. “He told me he bought [2002 album] Souljacker the day it came out. He’s been listening to us for a long time, so who’s the superhero now?”
But it wasn’t just down to the fact that Rudd is an Eels diehard that E appeared in the film. His cameo was more a nod to the fact that his father was the renowned late quantum physicist Hugh Everett III, the very man who came up with the idea of parallel worlds and multiverses that many of the recent MCU films have leaned into.
“My father wrote the parallel universe theory that the Ant-Man movie is based on,” E told Ticketmaster. “Virtually every superhero movie these days, and even non-superhero movies, like Everything Everywhere All At Once, are based on my father’s theory. The Quantumania director is a fan of the Eels, and he thought it’d be a fun Easter egg or whatever to have me do a little cameo.”
Watch E’s brief appearance in the film below:
