Peter Dinklage In Talks To Join ‘Avengers: Infinity War’
Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage may be adding a new franchise to his resume, as he’s in early talks for an unspecified role in Avengers: Infinity War, Deadline has confirmed. Marvel had no comment on the talks.
Directed by Captain America Winter Soldier and Civil War helmers Anthony Russo and Joe Russo from a script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the upcoming film is already set to be the biggest Marvel Studios project yet. Plot details about Avengers: Infinity War are slim so far, but it’s known that it will see the titular superhero team joining forces with numerous characters from across the MCU to battle galactic supervillain Thanos (Josh Brolin) for control of franchise-MacGuffins the Infinity Stones. The objects control aspects of the universe like time, space, and so on, and whomever possesses them all is able to control the fabric of reality itself. They’ve played a role in the Avengers, Captain America, Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange, and Thor franchises so far.
As for Dinklage’s role in the film, one character often referred to in the same breath as Dinklage is the villain MODOK, a recurring enemy of Captain America created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1967. Formerly a technician named George Tarleton, he was modified by a research lab into a hyperintelligent being – Mental Organism Designed Only for Computing. Naturally, he quickly rebeled, changing his moniker to MODOK – Mental/Mobile/Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing. Notably, the villain is strongly associated with the “cosmic cube,” dubbed the “tesseract” in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, one of the (you guessed it) Infinity Stones.
Christopher Markus has been vocal about bringing the character into the MCU since first coming aboard the Captain America franchise to write The First Avenger, and in a 2011 interview he specifically suggested Dinklage for the role. “I will win you over to Peter Dinklage as MODOK,” Markus said to the LA Times at the time. “If he came around the corner and you saw him floating there you would be terrified. It would be amazing.”
If he joins the film, it wouldn’t be Dinklage’s first time playing a Marvel character – the multiple Emmy-winner previously portrayed supervillain Bolivar Trask, creator of the Sentinel robots, in 2014 X-Men: Days Of Future Past. Note of course that the X-Men films are not part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe built around the Avengers franchise.
Avengers: Infinity War is set for release May 5, 2018.
Deadline sister publication Variety first reported Dinklage’s possible involvement in the film.
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