According to Deadline, actor Julia Garner has been cast as the Silver Surfer in the upcoming MCU Fantastic Four movie. They believe she will play a Shalla-Bal variant, which is neat! Shalla-Bal is the normal Surfer’s home planet girlfriend, who he saved by sacrificing himself to Galactus. Interesting choice instead of just gender-flipping Norrin Radd.

As a lifelong Silver Surfer fan, I am perfectly OK with the movie switching the Surfer to Shalla-Bal and making the character female. A girl can be as introspective and as awesome as a dude, and the same can be said about Silver Surfer! I don’t know Garner as an actor, but all I’m hearing online are great things. So this should be pretty awesome.

Since we have so few details, a lot of people online are grasping at straws. They think she’ll be based on a Shalla-Bal version of the Surfer from a single issue of Earth X, or that this will be the Silver Surfer of an alternate reality. Personally, I think it’ll just be a story where Shalla-Bal instead of Norrin Radd sacrificed themselves to Galactus to save Zenn-La. Norrin Radd and Shalla-Bal are very similar characters, and I wouldn’t expect any great difference between the two.

But I could be very wrong. What do I know?

This movie just gets more and more interesting! Marvel, of course, hasn’t confirmed or denied anything.

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