Earlier this year, Emmy-winning actor Yahya Abdul-Mateen II riled up comic book movie nerds when he called acting in superhero movies “clown work”. Abdul-Mateen won his Emmy for playing Dr. Manhattan on Watchmen, and he plays the villain Black Manta in the Aquaman movies, which is what he was specifically referencing as “clown work”. Well, send in the clowns because word broke late yesterday that Abdul-Mateen will play Wonder Man in the MCU.
Wonder Man, aka Simon Williams, will headline his own Disney+ series to be directed, at least in part, by Destin Daniel Cretton. There’s no timeline for when the Wonder Man series will arrive as yet, but Cretton has also been tapped to direct Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, due in 2025, which implies Wonder Man will be involved in that movie in some capacity. I expect the show will come first, if they’re casting now—Sir Ben Kingsley is set to reprise his role as Trevor Slattery—then they’ll probably be filming by the end of the year, or maybe early 2024, in order to get the show out before Cretton’s Avengers movie.
As for who Simon Williams is, well, he’s yet another person Tony Stark once pissed off. With Tony now dead in the MCU, maybe they’ll tweak that a bit, but in the comics, Simon inherits a munitions company that loses out to Stark Industries constantly, so when he gets superpowers, he starts out as an antagonist. Initially, he works with Baron Zemo, so this means Daniel Brühl could potentially return to the MCU to dance his way into our hearts once again. But there’s so little information about the series right now, it’s impossible to tell what they’re going to do with this character, except that they’ve cast a very good actor to play Wonder Man, even if he does think it’s clown work.
