How Jonathan Majors, the hot Hollywood actor and newest Marvel villain in ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,’ honed his craft at Yale

Jonathan Majors is the young film star to watch right now.

Last month, he wowed the Sundance Festival in Utah with his turn as bodybuilder Killian Maddox in “Magazine Dreams,” a role for which he reportedly underwent months of rigorous workouts and high-calorie diets. This weekend, he makes his debut as the supervillain Kang the Conqueror in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” a world-changing role he’s slated to play in at least two more movies, “Avengers: Kang Dynasty” and “Avengers: Secret Wars,” a commitment to the Marvel Universe that will last until at least 2026.

In March, Majors will be in another potential blockbuster, “Creed III,” as a childhood friend of the title character who ends up battling him in the boxing ring.

All this activity has happened in the seven years since Majors graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 2016. Among the “special skills” listed on his resume when he graduated were clowning, mask work, the “sword and shield” fighting technique, numerous sports and 12 years as a Golden Gloves boxer. The “special skills” list ends with this phrase: “Extremely physical.”

When actors complete the three-year graduate acting program at Yale, they take part in a showcase where they are seen by potential agents and other show business professionals. These showcases are often where the students’ careers begin. But Majors wasn’t at his. He’d already landed a job, playing gay rights activist Ken Jones in the eight-part ABC miniseries “When We Rise.”

He now has over a dozen movie credits, including the Netflix western “The Harder They Fall” with Idris Elba. His TV roles have included starring as Atticus Sampson “Tic” Freeman in the creepy and critically acclaimed horror/civil rights series “Lovecraft County” and guesting as “He Who Remains” in the Disney Channel Marvel series “Loki.”

At Yale, Majors played mythic figures as well, just not of the Marvel variety. He was Agamemnon the king in a student production of Aeschylus’ Greek tragedy “The Oresteia.” At the student-run Yale Cabaret, he played Ogun in “The Brothers Size,” Tarell Alvin McCraney’s blend of human-sized family drama and cosmic religious imagery and African trickster legends. On the other side of the spectrum, he played the infirm but cheery old man Sorin in Chekhov’s naturalistic drama “The Seagull.”

Majors did some comedy as well, in “The Commedia Project” directed by the school’s clowning expert Christopher Bayes. He also originated the tricky role of Pika, a young solider in Hansol Jung’s study of prejudice and civil unrest in Uganda, “Cardboard Piano.” The play was done when Jung was a playwriting student at the drama school and went on to have several productions around the country.

I had the opportunity to see Majors in several shows at Yale as well as in a 2013 production of Jeff Augustin’s “Cry Old Kingdom,” a darkly tranquil drama set during the reign of dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti, at the Human Festival in Louisville, Kentucky. In his stage work, Majors demonstrated the range and mercurial talent that movie and TV audiences can now confirm. He was capable of quiet, tender, understated moments (”The Brothers Size” was staged in the middle of the Yale Cabaret space, within inches of the audience, and the cast members could practically whisper their lines) and grand physical comedy. He played young and old, fragile and supremely confident, Greek tragedy and world premieres.

Majors mentioned his Yale years when he hosted “Saturday Night Live” in November, sharing in his opening monologue that “I was a military brat. My father was in the Air Force, my mother was a pastor — Hallelujah!— so I moved around a lot. I like to say I was born in California, raised in Texas, educated in North Carolina, roughed up in New York City and re-educated in New Haven, Connecticut. Which I guess is my roundabout way of saying ‘Yeah, I went to Yale.’”

A story this month in “Vanity Fair” magazine begins by saying Majors “hasn’t technically had a place he calls home since he finished grad school in 2016.” It mentions him getting his first big film role, in “Hostiles” with Christian Bale, shortly after graduation, and also that his first meeting about being part of the Marvel Universe was also shortly after finishing drama school.

In the article, the athletic Majors recalls being troubled by his Yale teachers’ insistence that students shouldn’t lift weights or do heavy workouts “because it changes your joints, changes what we call the breathing costume. I always had an issue with that.”

When asked to define what it means to be a movie star, he said, “Look, there’s a time I thought it was a dirty word, you know what I mean? Movie star. In school, you would never dream of saying something so ambitious.”

Reach reporter Christopher Arnott at carnott@courant.com.