Who Is Iman Vellani? Pakistani-Canadian Actor Marvel’s First Muslim Superhero

19-year-old Pakistani-Canadian Actor Iman Vellani is cast as the title character Kamala Khan in the Disney+ series Ms Marvel, making her onscreen debut. She is also set to reprise her role in the upcoming 2023 film, The Marvels.

Who Is Iman Vellani?

Cast as superhero Kamala Khan in the 2020 Marvel Cinematic Universe, Vellani will play the role in the upcoming 2022 series, Ms Marvel and the 2023 film The Marvels. Sana Amanat, co-creator of Kamala Khan, is also serving as a co-executive producer on the television series. In a zoom audition, Vellani revealed that she is an Avengers fangirl. 

The New Jersey native Vellani proclaimed herself to be obsessed with comics. Before the Disney+ series came her way, Iman was a high school senior, dreaming to be a part of the Marvel project where now she is playing one of its powerful costumed superheroes many actors have spent their life idol worshipping. 

Two years prior to becoming a Marvel cast, as per the New York Times, Iman said, speaking in a video interview from Los Angeles as part of her first-ever round of media promotion, that she was in high school in Markham, Ontario, where her family had emigrated from Karachi when she was only about a year old.

Iman, was then 5 years old, when Iron Man, the first MCU movie was released. She grew up to become a zealous Marvel devotee who confesses that her three favourite people in the world are Robert Downey Jr., Billy Joel and Kevin Feige, president of the Marvel Studios. 

After auditioning for her high school’s drama department at age 13, she said that her dream role would be anything in the MCU. A few years later, on coming to school for Halloween, dressed in a Ms Marvel costume she designed along with her grandmother, Vellani had to buy a comic book and hold it with her lest people mistook her for DC’s Flash. 

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In comparison with perennial and long-established Marvel superheroes like Captain America, or Spider-man, ">Kamala Khan is a youngster. Created less than a decade ago by a team including Sana Amanat or Marvel’s publishing editor, Amanat expressed her intentions of casting someone who was like the character herself, a Muslim and a child of Pakistani immigrants. Willing to carry forward Kamala’s stories and reflect on some of the “tribulations of being an awkward brown teenager,” the narrative choice, she said, was meant to portray the real-life dynamic Kamala experienced in her childhood.

Feature Image Credit: Arab News.