With forty years of appearing in Marvel comics before she arrived on the big screen, Alicia Masters, love interest to the Fantastic Four's human lump of stone The Thing, had always had a fairly established appearance as a white woman with strawberry blonde hair. However, the character's defining features have always been her role as a successful sculptor who is also blind. Alicia's blindness allows her to "see" the world and its characters in a different way, not judging by surface appearance, making her the perfect love interest for craggy Ben Grimm. It also meant that it made perfect sense for the film's casting directors to look beyond Alicia's established physical appearance to find an actress right for the past. Django Unchained's Kerry Washington was given the role for both the slightly lacklustre Fantastic Four films directed by Tim Story in the 2000s. Her performance in an underwritten and somewhat idealised role was perfectly adequate, but the films themselves were unmemorable. The franchise is being rebooted next summer and having race swapped a relatively minor character before, the studio now has the confidence to do the same with one of the leads (more on that later).
