RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Shea Couleé joins the cast of Marvel’s Ironheart
The Disney Plus series will follow the adventures of teen genius Riri Williams after her introduction in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Aux News Shea Couleé
RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Shea Couleé is the latest actor to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As reported by Deadline, she has been cast in the upcoming Disney+ series Ironheart. According to further confirmation from Entertainment Weekly, Couleé will be a series regular, though there are no hints about the nature of the role or whether it will involve being in or out of drag.
Comics readers have already started speculating that Couleé will be playing a character she inspired. Created by Sina Grace, Shade is a drag queen superhero who also uses the alias Darkveil. “I always toyed with the idea of a drag queen who becomes a reluctant hero,” Grace describes in a 2019 essay for PopSugar.
The character is notably a mutant; due to rights issues, the X-Men were not available to be included in the MCU until Disney’s 2019 acquisition of Fox. The concept of mutants was finally introduced this year, though it remains to be seen how they’ll fit into the current landscape and how the team’s classic line-up will emerge.
Ironheart stars Dominique Thorne (If Beale Street Could Talk) as the titular hero. Also known as Riri Williams, the character is a technologically-gifted young prodigy from Chicago who is inspired by Iron Man to build her own armored suit and is eventually mentored by Tony Stark himself before having to assume his role. She will be introduced later this year in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and can be spotted in the trailer working with Shuri and creating her costume.
Details about how Ironheart will fit into the wider MCU have been kept under wraps so far, including how she winds up in Wakanda. (It seems pretty safe to say that Iron Man won’t be making an appearance.) Other confirmed cast members include Alden Ehrenreich (Hail, Caesar!) and Anthony Ramos (In The Heights), though their roles are also unknown.
Ironheart is anticipated for a Fall 2023 release.
5 Comments
Whew. For a second there I thought RuPaul was gonna step in and give Monet X Change another free pass.Yeah, I said it. Bottom 4.
You say this on an article about a queen who was only in the finale bc of Ru’s whims? I don’t mean to shade Shea, she’s amazing, but that 3 star win screamed rigor morris to me. She seemed to fade into the background for several episodes. I’m not sure what happened.
Oh, you weren’t the only one, trust me. That 3 star twist was some bulllllllllshit. Like, 2 stars I might not have said something (lie, I still woulda) but with 3 you’re pretty much guaranteeing two people a spot in the final when Monet and Shae were middling the whole season. The Viv should have got at least one of those spots. And Trinity… love her with all my heart but she shouldn’t have been there either. Raja shoulda got that shot. I also have to agree with my wife, though. Ru was gonna give it to Jinx no matter who showed up to that lip sync, which was proven when Monet committed murder on that final lip sync and walked away looking for that bottom 4 money (which, honestly, she should have got).
So, while it would be awesome to see Shea portray Shade, Shea wrote on twitter yesterday that she already filmed her part last week. To me, this sounds like it’s a very small role, and I’m guessing that in all likelihood she’s just going to play a drag queen when Riri goes to drag brunch or something, like when drag queens Willam and Shangela were cast in A Star is Born to play drag queens.
Alden Ehrenreich (Hail, Caesar!)… you’re very kind.More to the point, it’s getting harder and harder to really get excited about these MCU Disney+ shows. Some of them have been good, some not so much, but other than Loki, none have felt particularly relevant or important to the overall story (Wandavision, for example, is sort of its own branch at this point, leading to Dr. Strange 2 and the Agatha show, but probably not much else). So if Ironheart is just OK, but I need to watch it to understand the character’s 5-minute appearance in an Avengers movie in 2026, is that worth it?