A man whose family died in a battle the Avengers were fighting to save people, who decided that the right response was not to fight them but to make them come apart from the inside.
Helmut Zemo is the most effective villain in these films and he never throws a punch. He is a Sokovian baron and a colonel of an elite commando unit, and his family is killed in the battle the Avengers fight against Ultron in Sokovia. He does not blame Ultron.
What he does instead is study them. He finds the record of Hydra’s Winter Soldier programme, he frames Bucky Barnes for a bombing in Vienna to get the location out of the authorities, and then he arranges for Tony Stark to watch footage of Barnes killing Stark’s parents while Steve Rogers is standing in the room. Everything after that happens by itself.
Daniel Brühl plays him quietly, which is what makes the last scene land. He is asked whether he really thought he could kill them. He says he never wanted to.
Show detailsA villain the sequel had to keep
By the end of Civil War Zemo has succeeded completely and is in custody, which is normally where a Marvel villain stops. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier takes him out of the cell instead and makes him a source, because the question the series is asking, what a super soldier is for, is the one question he has thought about longer than anyone.