Nia DaCosta’s Captain Marvel sequel has now formally arrived at the “Okay, let’s guess who the bad guy’s going to be” phase of its existence, with Deadline reporting that Zawe Ashton will be playing the villain in Brie Larson’s return to the role of everybody’s favorite cosmic MCU badass. Ashton is probably best known to audiences for playing Josephina in 2019's art-horror satire Velvet Buzzsaw, along with starring roles in Netflix’s Wanderlust and British comedy series Fresh Meat.
And since Marvel won’t just tell us who Ashton is playing, it’s time for that most hallowed of A.V. Club traditions: Baseless speculation, powered by nothing more than our knowledge of comic books that are sometimes 20-40 full years old. Now, given that Carol Danvers doesn’t actually have all that many non-Kree specific enemies, our soft money here is on Ashton playing Karla “Moonstone” Sofen, who served as Danvers’ evil counterpart during Marvel’s uber-gritty “Dark Reign” period in the late 2000s. While she and Carol have had (relatively) few direct run-ins (tangling more often with the first Captain Marvel, and the Hulk), Moonstone is an interesting character in her own right: A rogue psychiatrist who enjoys killing people as much as she does analyzing her foes. And, again: There are also just really a very, very small number of “Captain Marvel villains” running around the world of Marvel Comics, so, she kind of ends up being our best guess by default.
Or, hey, maybe Ashton’s playing a Skrull. (It’s always the Skrulls!)
Captain Marvel 2 is currently scheduled for November of 2022, with DaCosta directing from a script penned by WandaVision story editor Megan McDonnell.