Guy Pearce is fit to become the new fanboy flavor of the month as he not only has a small role in Ridley Scott’s upcoming Prometheus, but will now reportedly play geneticist Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 3 for director Shane Black.
According to the report from Variety, Iron Man 3 will borrow heavily from Warren Ellis‘s six-issue “Iron Man: Extremis” comicbooks, which also inspired the first Iron Man feature. Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige recently said they are metaphorically putting Tony back in the cave. He’s stripped of everything, back against a wall, and has nothing but his intelligence to get him out.
Pearce’s character Killian co-created the Extremis nanotechnology serum, an attempt to recreate the Super-Soldier Serum, which interfaces with the brain’s ‘repair center’ and directs the body to rebuild itself from scratch as if it were all wound tissue to be replaced. The film is said to focus heavily on the spread of a virus through this serum.
Pearce joins members of the returning cast including Robert Downey Jr. back in the lead role as Tony Stark and Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle and Scarlett Johansson as well as Ben Kingsley who will play one of the film’s villains, but reportedly not the main villain.
Production on the film is set to begin in May in and around North Carolina for a May 3, 2013 release.
