Wonder Man Will Make Trevor Slattery Into More Than a Joke

Even though his Lear was the toast of Croydon, Trevor Slattery has never enjoyed respect, neither within the fictional MCU nor in the real world. Some fans still hate the fake out from Iron Man 3, which revealed that Iron Man’s feared magic-using terrorist arch-enemy is an actually an English actor called Trevor. Others like him, but only as a bumbling fool who undercut the racist tropes in the Mandarin character and then got to pal around with Shang-Chi.

According to Trevor’s actor Sir Ben Kingsley, all of that will change with the Disney+ series Wonder Man. The series will not only return Trevor to Hollywood, but also give him a chance at success. “A series of extraordinary events place him exactly in that space, which crowns him and compromises him at the same time,” Kingsley told Entertainment Weekly. “He’s pulled in two directions at the same time.”

Wonder Man will team Trevor with Simon Williams, a struggling actor portrayed by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. When he learns that an idiosyncratic auteur plans to remake a ’70s children show about a fictional superhero called Wonder Man, Williams goes all out to earn the part, including hiring Trevor as an acting coach and, eventually, getting superpowers.

Wonder Man finally brings a long-standing member of the Avengers to the MCU, but it does so in a somewhat unexpected manner. The Wonder Man of the comics began as a likable lunkhead who gets tricked into fighting the Avengers, and promptly sacrifices himself to save the team. Long later, and after his memories were used to help create the Avenger Vision, Wonder Man is resurrected and his backstory is fleshed out, revealing that he was a nerdy scientist who gained super-strength during ionic-based experiments. Some time after his resurrection, and during his tenure with the Avengers, Wonder Man went to Hollywood to become a stunt man and, eventually, a leading man.

That Hollywood story is the clearest inspiration for the Wonder Man series, co-created by Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest, a writer for Community and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

As a Hollywood story, Wonder Man will deal with the idiosyncrasies of show biz, Kingsely explained. “We look at the casting process, we look at the auditioning process, we look at the directing process, the writing process… We look at the ego traps. We look at the seductive side of fame. We look at everything that’s beautiful and good, and also everything that’s vulnerable and rather unhealthy, but in a very entertaining, non-judgmental way.”

Even more importantly for his character, Kingsley said Wonder Man presents a “fascinating” story, in which Trevor will be “faced with a terrible dilemma: he can reach his ambition, but it’s at a terrible cost.”

Hard choices and terrible dilemmas? Sounds like the sort of thing that would make for Shakespearean drama and a fitting role for someone who brought King Lear to the good people of Croydon.

Wonder Man streams on Disney+ on January 27, 2026.