Wonder Man: Who is Trevor Slattery? The history of this MCU character explored

Wonder Man is set to feature Ben Kingsley's Trevor Slattery in a big way. For the uninitiated, Trevor's first MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) appearance was in Iron Man 3. After a brief role in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), Ben Kingsley is a co-lead of a Marvel Cinematic Universe project 12 years after his debut in the franchise.

Kingsley was widely promoted as Tony Stark's arch nemesis from the comics, The Mandarin, in the marketing campaign of Iron Man 3. However, the movie's pivotal twist reveals that Kingsley was not playing The Mandarin; instead, he is Trevor Slattery, a washed-up actor. After a brief stint in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, he has a key role in the miniseries.

"Aspiring Hollywood actor Simon Williams is struggling to get his career off the ground. During a chance meeting with Trevor Slattery, an actor whose biggest roles may be well behind him, Simon learns legendary director Von Kovak is remaking the superhero film “Wonder Man”. These two actors at opposite ends of their careers doggedly pursue life-changing roles in this film as audiences get a peek behind the curtain of the entertainment industry."

Who is Wonder Man's Trevor Slattery?

Trevor is imprisoned in the closing montage of Iron Man 3. But the MCU short, Marvel One-Shot: All Hail the King, sees the Ten Rings breaking Trevor out. The real Mandarin ordered his men to break Trevor out for ruining his name. This is why it wasn't surprising when MCU fans saw Kingsley as Trevor again in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

It seems Trevor managed to escape captivity from the Ten Rings and is giving his career another shot in Wonder Man. Ben Kingsley teased his Wonder Man role in an Entertainment Weekly interview this week:

"He manages to escape from the real Mandarin and from Shang-Chi land, and he flies back into Hollywood to give his career a second chance and to prove to his dear mother Dorothy, who always had faith in him and his talents, that he was truly the actor his mom always hoped he would be and that he always aspired to be. And a series of extraordinary events place him exactly in that space, which crowns him and compromises him at the same time. He's pulled in two directions at the same time."

He further teased:

"[Trevor] sees in Simon a friend, a colleague, but he also sees Simon as someone he can absolutely exploit for his own ends. It's quite a classic, basic human condition story. You are associated with somebody and you have an affinity with that person, but at the same time, you know that you're going to have to exploit that person to get to where you need to be."

Ben Kingsley also described the upcoming Wonder Man series as a "biography". It should be noted that Trevor Slattery has one of the wildest storylines in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He was used as a puppet, abducted by an international terrorist for being an unsuspecting pawn, and after finally escaping his captivity, he is going to star in a fictional superhero movie. This is what Kingsley told Entertainment Weekly:

"During Shang-Chi, Kevin Feige and [director] Destin [Daniel Cretton] suggested to me the possibility of Trevor reappearing for the fourth time in a TV series. We didn't even know the title, and I said, 'I'd be thrilled.' I love revisiting Trevor — there's so many layers to him. [This] series does see Trevor before he got the role of Mandarin, and then of course after, so it's a real biography — it's a biopic of Trevor in four episodes."

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Wonder Man will stream on Disney+ on January 27, 2026. It seems that all eight episodes of the series will stream together.

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