A colonel who spent his career building weapons out of the people he hated, across four films and three faces.
William Stryker is the human villain of the Fox series, an American colonel who leads Team X and then Weapon X and who hates mutants with the steadiness of a man who thinks he is being reasonable. Three actors play him: Brian Cox in X2, Danny Huston in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Josh Helman in Days of Future Past and Apocalypse, and the films visit his life in no particular order.
In X2 he is the main antagonist. He raids the school, takes many of the children and Xavier himself to his base at Alkali Lake, and plans to use his own son Jason’s power of illusion and a copy of Cerebro to make the professor kill every mutant on Earth with his mind. The X-Men and the Brotherhood stop him together. It is Magneto who reveals, in this film, that Stryker was the one who grafted the adamantium onto Wolverine’s bones.
Origins shows that history: Stryker running Weapon X, manipulating Logan into the bonding process, and wiping his memory with a shot to the head. Days of Future Past has a younger Stryker working with Bolivar Trask, and Apocalypse has him attack the mansion and capture Moira MacTaggert, Beast, Quicksilver and Mystique to interrogate them about Xavier. He is arrested at the end of that one.
Minor spoiler
At the end of X2 Wolverine leaves him to die in the destruction of Alkali Lake. The prequels are set before that, so no film has to explain how he survived it.
Show detailsTwo timelines
Days of Future Past rewrites the series’ history, and Stryker sits on both sides of the rewrite. In the original timeline he apprehends Mystique after she assassinates Trask and uses her DNA in the Sentinels. In the revised one he captures Wolverine for Weapon X, which is the version Apocalypse follows.