Meet Jennifer, the rock: Fantastic Four director reveals the unusual secret behind The Thing’s design

Marvel’s Fantastic Four: First Steps is coming soon, and I bet no one expected the most surprising character to be... a rock. Not the rocky skin of Ben Grimm, but an actual, literal desert rock affectionately named Jennifer.

According to director Matt Shakman, Jennifer was filmed in every single scene the Thing appears in. She’s not a cameo. She’s the texture model, and her presence on set says more about the MCU’s latest reboot than any glossy concept art ever could.

Forget the green screens. Forget the synthetic weightlessness of CGI cities collapsing for the hundredth time. Fantastic Four: First Steps is reaching for something older, heavier, more grounded, reintroducing Marvel’s First Family through a lens cracked open in 1965, where science fiction was still tactile and weird and full of wonder.

The offbeat method behind the Thing’s creation

It’s not unusual for superhero movies to lean on performance capture and digital effects to bring larger-than-life characters to screen. That’s the norm. What Fantastic Four: First Steps did goes far beyond standard VFX procedure.

To build the Thing, the team started with Ebon Moss-Bachrach in a mocap suit. Then came a practical stand-in, a performer in a full costume to give the other actors a reference for scale and eye-lines.

But what truly sets this production apart is what came next. The crew went into the desert, found a weathered rock that looked exactly like the version of Ben Grimm they had in mind, and filmed it. Extensively. Under every lighting setup, every time the Thing appeared in a scene.

“We went out to the desert and found a rock that looked exactly how we thought the Thing should look, and we filmed it in every single shot that the Thing appears in in the movie, under every lighting environment,” director Matt Shakman told Empire.

The rock was nicknamed Jennifer, and she wasn’t some quirky behind-the-scenes mascot in the production of Fantastic Four: First Steps. She became a key visual reference, a guide for how light moves across textured surfaces, how shadows pool in crevices, and how organic materials behave in a natural environment.

Instead of trying to fake realism with artificial shaders and procedural noise, the VFX team had a concrete standard, a geological anchor, something that felt old, grounded and real, the very essence of who the Thing is.

Using Jennifer served a clear purpose: grounding the Thing in something physical and specific. She gave the digital artists a map and helped them preserve the imperfections, the asymmetry, the slight color variations that make stone feel like stone, not just visually but emotionally. For Ben Grimm, those rough surfaces represent more than a costume or a transformation. They carry the burden of his identity, shaped by pain and marked by permanence.

Reviving old-school techniques for a retrofuturistic vision

There’s a reason Jennifer fits so naturally into this production. Fantastic Four: First Steps was never aiming for sleek minimalism or ultra-modern gloss. From the start, director Matt Shakman envisioned the film as a throwback, in tone, costume design and in the very texture of the image. He wanted it to feel like a lost sci-fi classic from 1965, as if Marvel’s First Family had always belonged to the same cinematic era that gave us 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barbarella.

And that vision shaped everything in Fantastic Four: First Steps, from the lighting rigs to the lenses to the way the Thing was lit on set. This approach echoes one of the most deliberate uses of analog filmmaking in modern cinema: Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

In 1992, Coppola famously rejected the digital effects that were becoming standard, opting instead for in-camera tricks that dated back to the earliest days of film. He used rear projection, miniatures, mirrors, forced perspective and double exposures, not for nostalgia, but because those limitations added a surreal, dreamlike quality no computer could replicate. That film needed to feel haunted.

Shakman’s intent for Fantastic Four: First Steps feels equally purposeful. The production embraced practical sets, vintage camera gear and real-time lighting experiments to build a world that looks like it was designed in the Space Age but shot entirely on Earth.

The Thing’s presence in Fantastic Four: First Steps, grounded in a real rock and shaped by real shadows, becomes a perfect extension of that vision. In a movie so heavily inspired by retro futurism, the use of physical reference stands true to its philosophy.

Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s view on Ben Grimm

The Thing might be built from stone, but there’s nothing cold or distant about Ben Grimm. That duality, brute force with a bruised heart, is what drew Ebon Moss-Bachrach to the role. And the actor’s connection to the character is personal.

“He’s a Lower East Side guy,” Moss-Bachrach told Empire. “A lot of this character was a homage to his father, and that, to me, is very meaningful.”

That sense of rootedness, of a man shaped by where he’s from, mirrors the film’s entire approach. Even when buried beneath digital stone, Ben Grimm remains unmistakably human.

Moss-Bachrach’s performance aimed at preserving the man beneath the rocky appearance. And he trusted the process completely.

“It’s a little bit heady to think about all the hundreds of people that are helping animate this character,” he said. “I just had faith that they would make my performance so much cooler. I’m very, very happy with the way Ben looks.”

There’s a humility in that statement, but also something revealing. Ben Grimm is often the emotional center of the Fantastic Four, the most visibly transformed but often the most grounded. Moss-Bachrach understood that from the beginning. And the result is a version of the character that looks massive and heavy but moves with surprising clarity, like someone who has learned to carry his weight because there’s no other choice.

A legacy of practical-meets-digital design

What makes the Thing feel different in Fantastic Four: First Steps has less to do with novelty and more with intention. Jennifer represents how much care this production put into grounding its effects in the physical world. That idea isn’t new. It belongs to a long lineage of filmmakers who understood that the most convincing visuals often start with something real.

Ridley Scott used giant models and detailed miniatures to build the Nostromo in Alien. George Miller flipped actual cars across the Namibian desert to make Mad Max: Fury Road feel like it had weight. Even Jon Favreau, when launching the MCU with Iron Man, relied on real suits and practical stunts before handing anything off to CGI.

In each case, the tactile came first. The technology followed. Fantastic Four: First Steps works the same way. Shakman and his team didn’t avoid digital effects. They simply refused to start there. By using physical references, real lighting and the unpredictable textures of nature itself, they gave their artists a baseline rooted in something concrete. Jennifer provided the anchor.

That approach may not scream innovation, but it makes a difference. The Thing has texture and mass. And he feels like he belongs in the same frame as the other characters, not as a digital overlay but as a physical presence shaped by the same light. That’s what Jennifer gave them. Not shortcuts, but contact.

What Jennifer says about the Fantastic Four reboot

Jennifer anchors the film's entire philosophy. This story is shaped by weight, material and decisions that leave a mark. From her rough surface to the way she holds light, Jennifer defines how Fantastic Four: First Steps approaches its characters: as people sculpted by their world.

That choice gives the reboot something rare in the genre: permanence. A sense that what we’re watching was constructed, and that it matters because it was made with care.