Phase Zero
Characters

Carl Creel / Absorbing Man

Absorbing Man

Carl CreelMarvel TelevisionEarth-616

A man who becomes whatever he touches, who worked for the wrong people until he found out what they were doing to a friend.

Carl Creel can take on the properties of whatever he touches: steel, stone, whatever is nearest. Brian Patrick Wade plays him, cast in August 2014. He arrives in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as a Hydra operative, recruited by John Garrett and brainwashed by Whitehall, and he is the series’ first proper demonstration of what a comics villain looks like on a television budget.

He does not stay a villain. Glenn Talbot hires him as a bodyguard, and he quits when Talbot is injured and hospitalised. Later General Hale hires him to hunt S.H.I.E.L.D., and he turns on her when he finds out she is holding Talbot prisoner, and helps Talbot and Coulson escape. Along the way he forms a mental link with gravitonium and discovers that the minds of Franklin Hall and Ian Quinn, two people it absorbed, are still inside it.

Minor spoiler

While he is recovering in hospital, Talbot, by then carrying gravitonium of his own, visits him and absorbs him into himself.

Played by
Brian Patrick Wade
Role
Hydra operative, later a bodyguard
Affiliation
Hydra, then Glenn Talbot
What they can do
Absorbs the properties of whatever he touches.

The journey

What happens to this person, title by title.

  1. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.2013

    Arrives as a Hydra weapon, ends up as Talbot's bodyguard, and switches sides when he learns what Hale is doing to him.

Appears in

  1. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.2013

Sources

Facts last checked on Sep 14, 2026