News culture Robert Downey Jr. is not the first to play two roles for Marvel: This actor was the biggest villain in the MCU and a superhero
While the prospect of seeing Robert Downey Jr. return to the MCU with a new role may seem strange, note that the actor is not the first to play multiple characters in the Marvel cinematic universe.
Back to basics
For “Doomsday” and “Secret Wars,” Marvel decided to play it safe and bring back the Russo brothers as director, but above all Robert Downey Jr. The actor, inseparable from the MCU since his role as Iron Man, should have said a final goodbye to the Marvel universe after Endgame and the death of Tony Stark. But this time, the production decided to give him a completely different role: that of Doctor Doom, the main antagonist of this new Avengers saga.
The actor will therefore have played two characters that are part of the same canon, that of the MCU. But if this new role can easily be justified by a possible scripting skill that Marvel has used and abused since the appearance of the multiverse, note that this double appearance in the MCU is less surprising when we know that Marvel has regularly used the same actors to play different characters. The most important of them is certainly Josh Brolin.
One character can hide another
Robert Downey Jr. is certainly the actor whose dual role within the MCU will have the greatest impact, whether on fans or on the narrative continuity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This new version of Doctor Doom could well turn out to be, as several members of the community already think, an alternate version of Tony Stark from another universe.
However, the actor is not the only one who has played several characters in different Marvel films. This is the case, among others, of Josh Brolin, who lends his voice and facial features to Thanos, the MCU’s most impressive antagonist to date. But the actor also plays Cable, a superhero closely linked to the X-Men who appears in the second installment of Deadpool. Let’s keep in mind that this second installment was not yet an integral part of the MCU, since it was Deadpool & Wolverine that linked this spatial-temporal continuity with that of the various Marvel Studios films.
In addition, there are also other actors who have played other, but certainly less significant, roles in several Marvel films. We will first remember Chris Evans (The Human Torch/Captain America), Michael B. Jordan (The Human Torch/Killmonger), Gemma Chan (Sersi/Minn-Erva) and Michelle Yeoh (Aleta Ogord/Ying Nan). We are therefore not so surprised by the return of Robert Doweny Jr., especially when Marvel already seemed to have run out of ideas in the past.
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