Stalingrad star Thomas Kretschmann is going to appear in not one but multiple, upcoming Marvel movies, beginning with a significant role in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, where he’ll star as the very serious sounding villain Baron Wolfgang von Strucker.
Kretschmann isn’t very well known to most American audiences, but has been working steadily since the late 1980s in films that range from The Karate Dog, Wanted and King Kong to the aforementioned Stalingrad, which has been performing very well overseas despite having limited to no presence here in the States.
Still, Marvel has an amazing track record when it comes to casting their movies, so we should all just chill out and be super confident about this particular casting choice, even though Baron on Strucker has a long and storied history in the Marvel Universe that is going to make expectations pretty lofty.
For those unfamiliar with the character, Baron von Strucker is a former Nazi officer (of course!) that wears a monocle and really, really hates S.H.I.E.L.D. He’s one of the leaders of Hydra, the organization that kept trying to make things super difficult for Captain America and friends in 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger.
Baron von Strucker has been around since 1964, so Whedon and the folks over at Marvel have a lot of history to pull from. No details yet on how the director plans to use the villain in the upcoming Avengers sequel but hopefully we’ll have a better idea once Captain America: The Winter Soldier hits theatres next month.
Do you think Thomas Kretschmann is the right man to wear the monocle? Let us know in the comments section below.