Here's The Best Look Yet at The Thing in the New 'Fantastic Four'

Jamie Bell as The Thing in ‘Fantastic Four’ (20th Century Fox)

The dribble of Fantastic Four photos continued on Thursday, when 20th Century Fox released the first official image of Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm once he has transformed into The Thing.

Fantastic Four also stars Miles Teller as Reed Richards, Kate Mara as Sue Storm, and Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm, Marvel’s famed scientist-turned-superhero team. Along with Bell’s Grimm, they get transformed into their superhero alter-egos — The Thing, Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, and The Human Torch — when their exploratory space shuttle sends them to a parallel universe. The comic-book adaptation hits theaters on July 8.

As you can see in the photo above, which was first published at Empire Online, Bell’s Thing skin looks way more realistic (at least, as much as a guy who gets turned into fragmented stone can look “realistic”) than the rubbery yellow get-up worn by Michael Chiklis in the two FF movies directed by Tim Story in the mid-’00s. What’s really impressive is that despite the broken rock encasing his body, Bell’s The Thing still has visible pectoral muscles.

Bell wore a motion-capture costume to render his rocky exterior, which audiences will first glimpse on the big screen once he busts out of a “transformation cocoon,” as director Josh Trank calls it in the new issue of Empire. In an exclusive video in January, writer-producer Simon Kinberg said that Grimm’s emergence from stone would definitely be one of the most freeze-framed moments in the first trailer…and, obviously, we agreed because we immediately GIF’d it.

Watch the trailer below: