‘This show is so monumental!’ Iman Vellani on playing Marvel’s first Muslim superhero

There is a moment about halfway through my interview with 19-year-old Iman Vellani, the actor shortly making her television debut as Marvel’s first Muslim superhero, Ms Marvel (or Kamala Khan, as she is known without the cape), when I wonder to whom I am really talking: Vellani or Kamala Khan?

We are meeting over a video call to talk about the six-part Disney+ series and find ourselves discussing the essence of a hero. “Well, as a wise man once said: ‘If you’re nothing without your suit, then you shouldn’t have it,” Vellani muses, from what looks like a hotel room in Los Angeles. She delivers the quote with such a straight tone that for a moment I think she must be quoting someone historical. Gandhi? Oscar Wilde? “It’s Tony Stark,” she says. I nod, momentarily forgetting that I live in the real world, not the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (For the uninitiated, Tony Stark is better known by his alter ego Iron Man, played on screen by Robert Downey Jr.)

The more I hear about fictional Kamala Khan – a New Jersey nerd of Pakistani heritage who is obsessed with comics and one day becomes a superhero – and real-world Vellani, a Pakistani-Canadian teenager and self-proclaimed