So, early scuttlebutt based solely on physical appearance appears to be wrong regarding Peter Dinklage’s role in X:Men: Days of Future Past. It doesn’t appear to be playing Alpha Flight member Puck after all, unless Bryan Singer is making the character the big bad guy.
Variety is reporting that Dinklage will be playing the “main antagonist” in the X-Men: First Class sequel. This will be the second time that Dinklage will be playing a villain in a superhero film, having previously played Simon Barsinister in 2007’s Underdog.
Of course, saying that Dinklage will be playing the main antagonist raises at least two more questions. One, exactly what character will he be playing and, two, could this mean that Singer is straying farther from the source material than we originally thought.
Because the main antagonists from the comic book story line the film was presumed to be adapted from were the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, which already appears in the film continuity with a slightly different line-up than in the comics, and the Sentinels. The Sentinels are giant robots created by a military scientist named Bolivar Trask for only one function–hunting and killing mutants. Could Dinklage be playing Trask? Well, Trask has already appeared in the film franchise. In X-Men: The Last Stand, Bill Duke played Trask and presented as head of the Department of Homeland Security. However, other characters have been reintroduced in different forms over the span of the franchise before, so this wouldn’t be much of a problem.
Trask doesn’t appear in the comic book storyline, but if you are introducing the Sentinels, it only makes sense to introduce their creator. So this increases the likelihood that Trask will be the character Dinklage is playing.
But if Dinklage will be playing something else, we have to ask how far from the original comic story will the film version be?
More to come, I’m sure.
