A sickly scientist who was snubbed by Tony Stark once, and built a terrorist movement out of the grudge.
Aldrich Killian co-developed Extremis, the virus that rewrites a body, and founded Advanced Idea Mechanics to sell what it could do. Guy Pearce plays him in two registers: the sickly man Tony Stark brushed off years before, and the polished one who comes back cured, with a private army of Extremis-enhanced soldiers and a plan to ruin Stark.
The plan is the Mandarin. Killian hires an actor to front a series of terrorist broadcasts, so the world has a face to fear while A.I.M.’s failed Extremis experiments, which tend to explode, get blamed on him. Maya Hansen’s research is the science; Killian is the one who turned it into a business.
Minor spoiler
He is killed by Pepper Potts, who has been given Extremis herself by then and turns out to be better at it than he is.
Show detailsThe twist, and what the series did about it
The reveal that the Mandarin was an actor, and that Killian was the real one, was the most argued-about decision in the film. Many comic readers objected to what it did to a major villain; others defended it for the social commentary and for sidestepping the racist caricature of the comics’ Mandarin. The series answered eight years later in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which introduced the actual leader of the Ten Rings, Xu Wenwu, and the actor, Trevor Slattery, who had been playing his name.