The first official trailer for Marvel’s new TV series, Wonder Man, has finally arrived.
The new footage debuted during the Marvel Television and Marvel Animation panel at New York Comic Con on Saturday.
“I’m very, very excited to be a part of the MCU. I think we’re really gonna tear it up,” Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who stars as Simon Williams/Wonder Man, said while joined onstage by costar Ben Kingsley.
The trailer shows Abdul-Mateen’s Simon, a working actor, learning that an old project called Wonder Man is being rebooted by a renowned and reclusive filmmaker named Von Kovak and is auditioning actors to play the titular character.
“I was born to play this character,” he says.
Simon is shown hyping himself up and doing vocal exercises in a trailer before his audition. He’s seen chatting with fellow actor Trevor Slattery (Kingsley), who’s also vying for the role.
Kingsley made his MCU debut in Iron Man 3 as Trevor, an actor who was hired by the film’s antagonist, Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) to pose as the Mandarin, the leader of the terrorist organization known as the Ten Rings. Kingsley returned as Trevor in the 2021 film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
One of the casting directors references Trevor’s history in the MCU, telling another person that they’re “pretty sure he used to be a terrorist.”
The trailer doesn’t reveal much else about the show, but in the comics, Simon has ionic superpowers. He has super strength, durability and the ability to fly. Simon was also a villain to the Avengers but ended up joining the superhero team. In the source material, Simon juggled his acting career with his superhero responsibilities.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Brad Winderbaum, the head of Marvel Television and Marvel Animation, said that Wonder Man is different than the studio’s other projects.
“In terms of how meta it is, without getting into details, it is a show that takes place within the MCU, but it’s a story about Hollywood,” he said. “And it’s a story about not just Hollywood, I would say it’s a story about acting and the journey of an actor in Hollywood, of having to balance being an artist with making money and very grounded ideas that anyone who came up in Hollywood or in the arts in general can relate to.”
All eight episodes of Wonder Man premiere on Tuesday, January 27, at 9 p.m. EST on Disney+.
