Fantastic Four Actor Didn’t Read The Comics But Had “Sexual Visions” Of Elfquest

Prior to being cast as Ben Grimm/The Thing in the upcoming Fantastic Four reboot, Ebon Moss-Bachrach had another brush with Marvel as David Lieberman/Micro in the first season of The Punisher. Now, as one of the stars of FX and Hulu’s The Bear, Moss-Bachrach has confessed that he was never really into Fantastic Four comics as a kid… and he was perhaps a little too into an indie fantasy comic.

“I was a comic book fan, but the comic books I read when I was a kid were more like the cheaper kind of ones I could get from the five-cent bin,” explained Moss-Bachrach during an interview with Variety. “I liked Archie, some Richie Rich. I really liked Groo. I liked Elfquest a lot. I think some of my earliest sexual visions were Elfquest.”

Since Moss-Bachrach was born in 1977, his prime comic book reading years probably came in the ’80s when Elfquest and Groo the Wanderer were both published by Marvel’s Epic imprint. Still, it is somewhat surprising that he’s essentially admitting to having sexual fantasies about the passion project of Wendy and Richard Pini.

As the name implies, Elfquest follows the lives of elves on planet that resembles Earth’s distant past. The Pinis published their first Elfquest comic in 1978, and they wrapped up their long-running story in 2018. There have been a few attempts to adapt Elfquest in Hollywood, including a deal with Warner Bros. in 2008 that was meant to bring the series to the big screen by writer and director Rawson Thurber. To date, none of those adaptations have gone through. However, the Pinis successfully crowdfunded Elfquest: The Audio Movie in 2021.

Moss-Bachrach’s Fantastic Four movie will open in theaters on July 25, 2025. But if an Elfquest movie ever gets made, perhaps he’ll also be interested in appearing in that.