Are Iron Man 3 spoilers fair game yet at this point? If you don’t think so, and you want to preserve your unspoiled first viewing of the movie, do skip this page. Because the big reveal of Shane Black’s take on the Iron Man story is a doozy, an outrage to many comic fans familiar with The Mandarin character and a pleasant surprise to folks like me who were unfamiliar with the source material for the character and frankly found it to be potentially problematic and borderline offensive. Learning that he’s a Brit merely playing the role of The Mandarin, literally an actor by the name of Trevor Slattery, suddenly makes this all ok.
They probably could not have picked a better name for a mild mannered British actor aside from literally naming him Ben Kingsley or perhaps Wesley Snipes (because as 30 Rock brilliantly pointed out, if you didn’t know the actor, would you think the name Wesley Snipes sounds more like a ripped black guy or a small, white British man?). It’s cool in itself that The Mandarin was turned into this figure who was actually playing off of people’s irrational and racist fears rather than the embodiment of that ignorance, and giving his portrayer the name Trevor Slattery drove that point home. Cheers to you, Mr. Black.
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