“I did talk to physicists and people that understand quantum mechanics and physics and all of that. During that time, I felt like I was understanding it.

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“This is the thing with really smart people: they talk to you and they make you feel like you’re smart. So I talked to brilliant scientists and ‘I think I get this’. Then I’d leave the room and the next day I’d go, ‘No, I don’t get it at all’.”

Rudd, 53, was best known for such comedies as the Anchorman movies and I Love You Man until he was cast in 2015’s Ant-Man. Bringing warm-hearted comedy to Hollywood’s biggest superhero franchise, it was a hit that took $US519 million ($730 million) around the world.

The 2018 sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp was an even bigger hit, taking $US623 million, so Marvel has high hopes for the new instalment, which opens in Australian cinemas on February 16.

Rudd said his life had changed as well as his Hollywood career since donning the Ant-Man suit.

“It’s the biggest thing I’d ever been a part of up to that point,” he said. “I’d done films and I had an acting career but Marvel was so visible and global.

“That was a really big change, I think, for me that these movies play in countries [with] different languages and they’re popular.”

Rudd now finds kids recognise him, point, and say his character’s name. “That never happened before,” he said.

Reed, whose previous films include Bring It On and Yes Man, thinks the Marvel movies are so successful because of the mythology established in the comic books that the studio has expanded, so superhero movies “cross-pollinate” with other superhero movies.

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“Our movie I think is the 31st MCU movie, which is insane to think about,” he said. “It’s a mythology and there’s a certain amount of wish fulfilment to it and there are morality tales in there.

“And what they’ve done, which is interesting, is get lots of different types of filmmakers and different tones. Quantumania has a very different tone to Wakanda Forever or Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

“There’s room for all these different tones, but they all serve this crazy larger narrative.”

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Email Garry Maddox at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @gmaddox.