As Benjamin Jacob Grimm would often say, "What a revolting development this is!" With the news of Disney purchasing 20th Century Fox's key assets, and now being able to use characters from the X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises in Disney's MCU, it would appear that Michael Chiklis is keen to reprise his role as the Fantastic Four's Thing, once again.
As to whether or not the gesture was offered in jest, I … I'm not really sure. I mean, why wouldn't you want to be Benjamin J. Grimm, right? In my opinion, Grimm is one of the most compelling characters in the Marvel universe. In my several-years history reading the character, I've found that Grimm's monstrous exterior disguises the kind-hearted hero that dwells beneath his rocky surface. The result is something akin to Marvel's version of Frankenstein's monster, with Ben having to cope with being a misunderstood behemoth in a society that is too vein to look beyond his craggy shell.
Chiklis played The Thing in Fox’s 2005 film FANTASTIC FOUR and its 2007 sequel FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER. Both films were considered to be a box office success at the time of their release, though the Marvel fandom has openly mocked the pair of films for being less-than-accurate representations of Marvel's first family. Personally, I think there's about 40-minutes worth of solid FF material between the two films, and that Josh Trank's 2015 reboot of the characters is the true cinematic crime against my favorite superhero team.
For the moment, Disney has not announced any plans to reboot the Fantastic Four themselves, though I'm sure that we'll be hearing something about it in the next year or so. If you want to watch a honest-to-goodness Fantastic Four movie, get your hands on a copy of Oley Sassone's version from 1994. It's about as low budget as you can get, but the movie is about the most true-to-form version of the FF captured on screen to this very day.