The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is certainly no stranger to recasting characters. Just look at what they did with the Hulk and War Machine. The former was played by Ed Norton before Mark Ruffalo stepped in while the latter was first brought to life by Terrence Howard, before he was replaced with Don Cheadle. But there’s one character who’s actually had three actors portray him so far and he’s not even that prominent a figure in the franchise.
We’re talking, of course, about Howard Stark. Sure, as the father of Tony, who is (or should that be, who was?) arguably the beating heart of the MCU, he’s a fairly important character, but he hasn’t had a tremendous amount of screentime over his cinematic career and yet, three different individuals have had the honor of playing him.
This interesting find comes to us from the folks over at ScreenRant, so kudos to them for noticing. And as they point out, the first person to show up as Howard was Gerard Sanders. Although, you’d be forgiven for not even realizing, as his brief moment in the spotlight comes near the start of Iron Man, when a slideshow shows us some key moments from Tony’s life, including his parents’ death. It’s here that Sanders appears in a few photographs.
Moving on, we then got John Slattery – perhaps the most recognizable of the bunch – who had the opportunity to play Howard in several MCU films, including Iron Man 2, Ant-Man, Captain America: Civil War and, of course, Avengers: Endgame. And finally, there was Dominic Cooper, who appeared in Captain America: The First Avenger as a young Howard, before going on to reprise the role in Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter and also on the Agent Carter TV series for a few episodes. Not to mention he’ll soon return to voice Howard in What If…?
Again, given that Mr. Stark is hardly as big a character as say the Hulk or even Rhodey, it’s not really a huge deal that Marvel’s already had three different actors play him and again, Cooper’s iteration is a younger version anyways. But still, this is a nice little piece of MCU trivia that you can now impress your friends with and it’ll be interesting to see if anyone else gets the chance to bring Tony’s dad to life as the franchise continues to unfold.
