Steven Yeun Joins The Cast of Marvel’s ‘Thunderbolts’

Steven Yeun is the latest actor to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With acting credits from The Walking Dead, Minari, and most recently Nope, Yeun landed a role for the highly anticipated Thunderbolts movie.

Per Deadline, Yeun, 39, will not only be playing a significant role in the film, but he could also play a role going forward in future MCU films, a source revealed. As announced during last year's Disney D23 event, the South Korean actor will be joining quite an ensemble cast. Florence Pugh stars as Yelena Belova, Sebastian Stan is the Winter Soldier/Bucky Barnes, David Harbour will reprise the Red Guardian, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, Wyatt Russell is John Walker/US Agent, Hannah John-Kamen returns as Ghost and Olga Kurylenko as Taskmaster/Antonia. Ayo Edebiri (The Bear) also joined the cast in an undisclosed role.

Thunderbolts is a sequel to Black Widow and Captain America: New World Order. Hence the aforementioned cast from both films reprising their roles. The Thunderbolts are an antihero team consisting of reformed supervillains. Not much else is known about the plot of the film. In the comics, the team is sent on missions commissioned by the government. Thunderbolts is set to release in theaters on July 26, 2024.

Jake Schreier is set as director of the latest addition to phase five. Schreier is already working with Yeun as director in the upcoming dark comedy Netflix series, Beef. Yeun leads the series opposite Ali Wong. The two get into a road rage incident that brings chaos into trying to destroy each others' lives.

Beef debuts on Netflix on April 6. Watch the trailer below:

In a recent interview with Empire, Yeun says of joining the MCU, "I don’t know if it was explicitly on my bucket list. It was more the story, getting to work with [Schreier] again, and what his intentions were. The intentions of the particular character that they wanted me to play were very clear. That’s what drew me to the film.”

Yeun left The Walking Dead in 2016 after his character Glenn was killed. Yeun hasn't let that role define his acting career. He has taken on very diverse roles, complex characters, and completely ridiculous yet hilarious projects. Yeun has starred in Jordan Peele's canceled The Twilight Zone revival, A24’s Oscar-nominated role in Minari, Jordan Peele's Nope, and the wacky, yet disturbing Sorry To Bother You.

Saturday was Marvel's big day at Disney's annual D23 event. Back in July, Marvel revealed a lot about their future shows and films at the San Diego ComicCon, and some series and films were expanded upon this weekend. Secret Invasion, starring Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury premieres in the spring. This weekend, we saw the trailer. Comic-Con also addressed the Hawkeyespinoff Echo, which was elaborated on at the D23 event. Ditto for Loki season two, also addressed in July and again this weekend. Ironheart, a character who will debut in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, also was discussed. Two big reveals of the weekend had to do with the Fantastic Four and the Thunderbolts.

A number of trailers were shown at D23 that have not been released on YouTube, including The Marvels. The Marvels' stars, Brie Larson as Carol (Captain Marvel) Danvers, Iman Vellani as Kamala (Ms. Marvel) Khan, and Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau, were all there, along with director Nia DaCosta.

Ryan Coogler appeared with some of the cast members of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and showed a new trailer. Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, and Jonathan Majors appeared and showed the trailer for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. None of the above trailers have been released in official form to YouTube or any other social media platform yet. Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio also took the stage to discuss the upcoming Daredevil series coming to Disney+, but production on that has not begun. Cox confirmed that his Matt Murdock/Daredevil character will only appear in one episode of the currently running series She-Hulk: Attorney At Law.

Meanwhile, fans of Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch, were disappointed when there was no mention of that character's future during the panel. Fans of Moon Knight, the Disney+ show starring Oscar Issac, were also disappointed when there was no mention of that character either. Fans were also hoping to get any news at all about the future of the X-Men (even the previously announced X-Men '97 animated series), but sadly, it was a mutant-free weekend.

Here's some of the big moments from D23.

It wasn't necessarily something we were expecting, but one of the first announcements was of a Werewolf By Night one-off special, airing October 7 on Disney+. Starring Gael Garcia Bernal in the lead role, it looks like a kitchy black-and-white tribute to classic monster movies, and in fact reminds us a bit of the "fake" trailers in the middle of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez 2007 double feature Grindhouse. Will this one-off tie in with the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Probably: these days, all of the MCU tales seem interconnected (then again, the recent I Am Groot series of shorts mostly stood on their own).

The other actual trailer that was released during D23 was Secret Invasion, which will center around Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury. Is this the real Nick Fury, or the one that has been mimicked by a Skull? We learned in Spider-Man: Far From Home that Talos ( Ben Mendelsohn), the Skull that we first met in Captain Marvel, was pretending he was Fury, while the real Fury was in space. But early in the Secret Invasion trailer, we see Cobie Smulders' Maria Hill scolding him for avoiding earth and for letting her calls go straight to voicemail. "Yeah, well... this is different," he responds. We can be pretty sure the this is the actual earth-born Nick Fury. We also see Don Cheadle's James Rhodes (who last cameoed in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), and Martin Freeman's Everett K. Ross who we last saw in Black Panther. The series is set to drop in the spring.

Don Cheadle's James Rhodes will also be seen in the upcoming Armor Wars series. Not much has been revealed about it, but the main theme is: what happens when Tony Stark's armor technology falls into the wrong hands. They haven't announced a release date for the show.

Ironheart, aka Riri Williams (played by Dominique Thorne) will make her debut later this year in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, before spinning off into her own Disney+ series. Black Panther director Ryan Coogler is producing the series and was on hand, as was Anthony Ramos, who was announced to be playing a character called "The Hood." Ramos is an original cast member of Broadway's Hamilton and also starred in In The Heights.

Ke Huy Quan was a famous child star, with big roles in Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom. This year, he had a big comeback with a major role in Everything, Everywhere All At Once. And now, he's joining the cast of Loki season two (the first Marvel Disney+ series to get a second season; What If...? has also been renewed).

Fans were expecting to get information of who was cast to play Marvel's first family, but that didn't happen (although rumors have been circulating that Jodie Comer will play Susan Storm). But the Matt Shakman directed film will hit theaters on November 8, 2024.

We'll forgive you if you don't remember Tim Blake Nelson's character: in 2008's The Incredible Hulk, he played Samuel Sterns, a scientist who tries to develop a cure to Bruce Banner's condition. It doesn't work and, without getting too into it, he also turns into a super powered character, known in the comics as The Leader. He makes his return in the upcoming Captain America: New World Order, which stars Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson as the new Captain America. We'll also see the return of Carl Lumbly's Isaiah Bradley from Falcon And The Winter Soldier; in that series, we learned that he was the real first Cap, before Steve Rodgers. We'll also see the return of Danny Ramirez's Joaquin Torres from the same series (in the comic book, he becomes the "new" Falcon). And Shira Haas makes her debut as Isreali superhero Sabra. Captain America: New World Order hits theaters May 3, 2024.

Well, at least some of them have been revealed. We've seen Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Valentina Allegra de Fontaine starting to recruit the team. She signed up Wyatt Russell's John Walker/USAgent in Falcon and the Winter Solider, and Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova in the Black Widow post credits scene. Now we know at least some of the other members of the team: Sebastian Stan's James "Bucky" Barnes, last seen in Falcon and the Winter Solider. David Harbour returns as Alexei Shostakov aka Red Guardian, ​who we met in Black Widow. And ​Hannah John-Kamen's Ghost, who we met in Ant-Man and the Wasp. Thunderbolts is due out July 26, 2024.

Echo, which will debut next summer, also had a trailer that has not been released publicly. The title character was introduced in the Hawkeye series and is played by Alaqua Cox. Per Variety, the trailer included subtitles, "shots of Native people and tons of Echo (Cox) kicking ass. At the very end of the first-look video, Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin returns and is wearing an eyepatch."