In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Tim Blake Nelson said he is pleased it took 16 years to return as The Leader in the MCU.
“Being brought back into the MCU by [Marvel producers] Kevin [Feige] and Nate [Moore] and Kyana [F. Davidson] to be a villain alongside Giancarlo [Esposito] against Anthony Mackey has been a great honor,” the actor said. “It’s been a really interesting adventure.”
He talked more about his comeback to the MCU, “I was heartbroken when it seemed I wasn’t going to come back as The Leader, but now I’m glad it took 16 years because it’s made the character more interesting.”
“And I’ve gotten to do a lot of other great stuff during those 16 years that maybe wouldn’t have come my way if I had played the lead villain character in a ‘Hulk’ sequel two years after Edward Norton’s ‘Hulk,'” Nelson continued his statements.
“I loved working with Edward and got to direct Edward in a movie right after that [2009’s ‘Leaves of Grass’], so not to take a panglossian attitude toward all this, I still do think it all happened in the best possible way, even though there was a lot of despair associated with the intervening years,” Tim added.
Nelson first appeared in ‘The Incredible Hulk’ as Samuel Sterns. He returns as The Leader in ‘Captain America: Brave New World,’ coming out on February 14, 2025. He previously told GamesRadar+ that he’s excited to be back in the franchise.
The actor explained, “I had given up on getting to play this character again and had despaired on that. I was astonished frankly when they said, ‘We’re bringing you back as The Leader, and it’s going to be in the Captain America franchise.’ I love Anthony Mackie, we’ve worked together before, we went to the same drama school, so I was all in.”
“He hasn’t been sitting around […] You can go and look in the comics for hints of what we’re up to. I think that the expansion of that into film language is going to astonish,” he further said.
The Leader was created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. He first appeared in ‘Tales to Astonish’ #62 in December 1964 as a major enemy of The Hulk. In the comics, he started as a janitor who gained super-intelligence from radiation. In the MCU, he is a biologist who worked with Bruce Banner to cure his Hulk condition but secretly studied his blood.
