Tim Blake Nelson played Samuel Sterns, aka The Leader, in The Incredible Hulk, and seventeen years later… he’s coming back for Captain America: Brave New World. It’s quite the stretch of time between appearances, and the actor told GamesRadar+ that the character is going to be different this time around.
“In this version, which is not the version I expected to play, I got to get better as an actor,” Nelson. “And thanks to Kevin [Feige] and Nate [Moore] and Julius [Onah] and the writers, they wrote a beautifully nuanced character that was a wonderful challenge to play and that I wouldn’t have been able to play 15 years ago, because I don’t think, hopefully anyway, I was the actor that I am now. What we want to do most as actors is continue to grow.“
Nelson continued, “And I feel like I needed this maturity to be able to play what they wrote. What drives Samuel Sterns as The Leader is a sense of justice through anarchy. There’s a lot of history behind it that is exposed really beautifully in the writing. And I’m incredibly grateful that they asked me back, and I had a great time with such a phenomenal cast. I’ve known a lot of them for many, many years, and I agree with Harrison, one of the features of the MCU is the way they curate the world. They put serious actors in their movies. They don’t mess around in terms of shallow choices in terms of casting, and that starts with Anthony, who has such depth and soul as an actor. But I would also say it applies to everyone on this screen right now. It’s great to be a part of that group.“
In The Incredible Hulk, Sterns is a cellular biologist who attempts to develop a cure for Bruce Banner’s condition. It is only near the end of the film that he is contaminated with Banner’s blood and begins mutating into The Leader. Clearly, the dude has been going through some stuff in the last two decades.
The official synopsis for Captain America: Brave New World: “Anthony Mackie returns as the high-flying hero Sam Wilson, who’s officially taken up the mantle of Captain America. After meeting with newly elected U.S. President Thaddeus Ross, Sam finds himself in the middle of an international incident. He must discover the reason behind a nefarious global plot before the true mastermind has the entire world seeing red.“
Captain America: Brave New World will debut on February 14th.
