In the world of comic books, the need for an endless array of villains to fight, and be ultimately defeated by, superheroes has meant some colorful and weird baddies have been created over the years. But in comic-book movies, villains are treated largely seriously, particularly in the towering realm of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. To that end, the next MCU movie to hit theaters, Captain America: Brave New World, is putting a more threatening spin on some of the comics’ sillier antagonists.
In a new Entertainment Weekly feature—which reminds readers that Captain America: Serpent Society was used as a joke title all the way back in 2014, as part of a Kevin Feige-hosted event announcing Marvel’s Phase Three films—Brave New World star Giancarlo Esposito, producer Nate Moore, and director Julius Onah explained that the Serpent Society, which Moore admitted “can be very goofy” in the comics, will be nothing to joke about in the new film. Figuring out how to do that was a key consideration early on.
“You take something that seems inherently ridiculous, and you figure out what the context of it could be,” Moore explained to EW. “And then we just got to work with a really talented actor,” he added, meaning Esposito.
Esposito is well aware of how his character, Seth Voelker aka Sidewinder, appears in the source material. “I went back to the comic. I figured out what the guy looked like. I didn’t want to look like that,” he said. “[Onah] wanted a groundedness of what I’m going to bring to it, but I wanted to borrow some color, the lining of the coat color, different subtleties from the original comic so I knew I could be channeling Seth Voelker.”
In Brave New World, Esposito said, the character is “very delicious and powerful,” while Onah teased that Esposito’s Sidewinder brings “a grounding and a gravitas to the Serpent Society.”
We’ll get to witness what sounds like a genuinely menacing take on Sidewinder when Captain America: Brave New World opens February 14.
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