Steven Yeun, once best known for playing Glenn on The Walking Dead, has been having one hell of a career blow-up in recent years. He’s appeared in movies like Nope and Minari, the latter of which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. He starred in the successful Netflix show Beef, and voices the title character in Amazon’s excellent superhero show Invincible, which is airing new episodes right now! Guy is everywhere.
And he’s nowhere near done. A while back, it was announced that Yeun would appear in Thunderbolts, an upcoming movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Thunderbolts will unite various antiheroes from across the MCU, including Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and more, all of them working under Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, played by none other than Harrison Ford.
Who will Yeun play? Up to now that’s been a mystery, but Invincible creator Robert Kirkman may have spilled the beans during a livestream chat with comic book artist David Finch. Read no further if you wish to avoid SPOILERS!
Who is Steven Yeun playing in Thunderbolts?
“My good friend Steven Yeun is playing the Sentry in a movie,” Kirkman said. “He called me, he went in for a costume fitting.”
At this point, Kirkman seems to realize he may have said too much. “I hope I’m not – I don’t think this is a spoiler or anything that will get anybody in trouble. I don’t know, maybe, we’ll see,” he said. “I don’t care, I don’t work for Marvel, what are they going to do to me?”
Kirkman ended with a crack about how the costumes for Sentry and Invincible look alike. “He said, ‘I just came back for a costume fitting for the Sentry. I guess I only do superheroes that are yellow and blue.'”
The Sentry is a superhero created by writer Paul Jenkins and artist Jae Lee, who first appeared in 2000’s The Sentry #1. He is known for his Superman-like powers but is also plagued by mental illness that manifests as an evil reflection of himself called The Void.
— Tree of Knowledge (@ToK_ScienceTree) November 17, 2023
The Sentry is… pic.twitter.com/kOxUyfojj8
Sentry is an interesting character in the Marvel canon. Introduced in 2000, his real name is Robert Reynolds, a middle-aged meth addict who wakes up one day and remembers that he is Sentry, a phenomenally powerful superhero. He can fly, he’s super-strong and fast, he has enhanced sense, he’s basically invulnerable…he’s sometimes called Marvel’s Superman, except that Superman was never addicted to meth, so far as we know.
It gets weirder. Sentry has an alter ego known as the Void, who is at once his arch-nemesis and a fundamental part of his being. The Void is just as powerful as Sentry, which makes him very dangerous. For every good deed Sentry does, the Void does something equally wicked.
In the movie, Sentry could be one of several antiheroes on the Thunderbolts team, he could be the villain of the piece, or he could be something else. We won’t know for sure until Thunderbolts comes out in theaters on July 25, 2025.
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h/t GamesRadar