There’s just over a month to go until Marvel Studios begins Phase Two of its Cinematic Universe as Robert Downey Jr.’s Armored Avenger returns for Iron Man 3, and a new series of interviews with the cast and crew have been released, which offer up quite a few spoilers from the hotly-anticipated solo sequel. So, with that in mind, you probably want to turn back now if you’re hoping to go into the film cold…
…Seriously, there are one or two things you might not want to know here…
…Still here? Okay then, so one of the big rumours about Iron Man 3 has been that Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts will be suiting up alongside Tony to do battle with the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) and his forces, and Paltrow has now brought an end to the discussion by confirming that is indeed the case: “There were talks of Pepper getting in the suit at the end of Iron Man 2, but Marvel wasn’t ready to do it yet….I know Robert was really interested in having Pepper do more in this movie, and it was also a factor in me coming back and getting to do things that were a little bit more fun and different and a little bit more adventurous. It would’ve still been nice, but it would’ve been very much the same thing just to be buttoned-up Pepper, and in this movie there’s a whole different experience of her… I didn’t mind wearing the suit at all. I thought it was light and perfectly comfortable and my children thought I was extremely cool. They were here on a day where I was in it, so they were trying it on and when my son saw me in the suit, he had the biggest eyes, so it was definitely worth it.”
Pepper Potts isn’t the only one of Tony’s allies who’ll be donning the armor in Iron Man 3, with Rhodey’s (Don Cheadle) War Machine armor getting a shiny new Iron Patriot paint job. Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige offered some details about Rhodey’s involvement in the film: “What we learn in the beginning of Iron Man 3 is that they’ve made an arrangement. Tony has let Rhodey have this suit; he’s using it in conjunction with the US Government. So, at the beginning of Iron Man 3, we see that the President has asked Rhodey as War Machine to get a new paint job and take on the new moniker of the Iron Patriot in order to do American business and be the American hero as opposed to The Avengers or Iron Man himself, who is sort of a separate entity… In a way it becomes a buddy action film, in the third act, where they team up. Neither of them have a suit at a certain point in the movie and they really team up in a great, sort of old- fashioned action movie way and Don and Robert have such an amazing rapport.”
Feige also went into some depth about the film’s plot: “You’ve seen in the trailers that there’s an attack on Tony’s house. So by the end of the first act of Iron Man 3, his house is gone. His technology is gone. All he has is a barely functioning, prototype suit that, soon after he escapes from the house that’s destroyed, is not functioning at all. So Tony finds himself in the middle of the United States of America, in Rose Hill, Tennessee, completely out of his element. A guy who lives in Malibu and goes to Monaco and gallivants in Manhattan in the middle of Rose Hill, Tennessee, with a suit not working, doing an investigation about the villain known as the Mandarin, to try to figure out where he is. Tony believes there are clues here that are going to lead him to find where the Mandarin is, so he drags the broken suit into a shed that he finds and takes an axe and opens it up. It turns out that he is in the little workshop of this young boy named Harley.”
From watching the Iron Man 3 trailers, you may have noticed that The Mandarin appears to be sporting a Captain America tattoo on his neck, and Feige went on to explain what that is all about: “Shane Black had an idea of making him somebody whose background is unknown. We don’t know where he’s from at first, but he seems to be some kind of military officer that has gone off the reservation. He is starting to pull all of this iconography and symbolism from other cultures to his own ends to use them as symbols to pervert the symbol of the United States. He utilizes the moniker of the Mandarin and robes with dragons on them and uses South American sort of guerrilla tactics to create this aura of fear of his terror organization. The Mandarin is sort of a very frightening, modern-day terrorist who has taken terror motifs from all over the world to use to his own ends. It was a very cool and relevant and scary idea.”
And finally, if you were wondering how Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) and AIM fit into things, then Feige also dropped a few comments about that too: “Killian heads a brain-trust organization called AIM that is developing Extremis, which is something that taps into human DNA and is able to reprogram it and regenerate limbs and enhance strength and cure wounds. But it also could change the whole world, which is what Killian intends to do with it.”
Iron Man 3 is released in the UK on April 25th and opens in North America cinemas on May 3rd. Hopefully there’ll still be one or two surprises left by then…
