A Swedish astrophysicist who grew up on stories about Asgard, met one of its princes in the New Mexico desert, and was never quite the same.
Erik Selvig is an astrophysicist, born in Stockholm in 1951 according to Wikipedia’s article on him, who grew up hearing the legends of Asgard and became a professor at Culver University, where he met Bruce Banner and took Jane Foster, the daughter of a colleague, under his wing. Stellan Skarsgård plays him in five films. The reader who sent this list called him the man who became an expert in Asgardian mythos, which is where he started.
In Thor he is in New Mexico with Jane and Darcy Lewis when a powerless Thor appears out of a storm, and Nick Fury recruits him afterwards to study the Tesseract, unaware that he is already under Loki’s influence. In The Avengers Loki takes him fully, and Selvig builds the device that opens the portal over Stark Tower; knocked free of the control, he tells Natasha Romanoff that Loki’s sceptre can shut it. A year later the aftermath has given him a mental breakdown, which is the state Thor finds him in for The Dark World, where his teleportation devices are what send Malekith and his army back. By Age of Ultron he has recovered, takes Thor to the Water of Sights, and joins the Avengers compound afterwards.
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The article on him uses Endgame and Far From Home for what happened to him offscreen: he is among those Thanos dusts and is brought back in 2023, and he later hosts a television special on Einstein-Rosen bridges. Its lead lists only five films for Skarsgård, and those five are his list here. In Love and Thunder Jane consults him about her cancer treatment and he tells her it is not working. An alternate version appeared in the animated Marvel Zombies, which this catalogue does not count for live-action people.