Lee Pace Opens Up About Guardians of the Galaxy’s Ronan The Accuser

By Rudie Obias | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

Lee Pace & Ronan The AccuserMarvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy has a lot to live up to in terms of Marvel’s overall cinematic universe. The movie will follows up Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a beloved character, and it directly leads into The Avengers: Age of Ultron. The cosmic comic book movie is also Marvel’s first film that has a questionable following among general audiences and casual fans. Part of director James Gunn’s attempts to soften the hardcore genre elements is to cast recognizable faces such as Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, and Benicio del Toro. The primary villain, Ronan The Accuser (Lee Pace), just might be the key to understanding and enjoying Guardians of the Galaxy.

In an interview with SciFiNow.com, Pace opened up about playing one of the most menacing members of the Kree Empire. Audiences will get a chance to watch Pace in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug this December, and it’s going to be interesting to see how he makes Ronan the Accuser a towering and villainous figure, by comparison. Pace explained:

The characters couldn’t be more different!” he told SciFiNow magazine recently. “I remember walking on set [of Guardians of the Galaxy], and I was like ‘Very un-elfy, right guys?’” Pace said. “[Ronan] is a real psychopathic beast. I’m having the best time playing it. I kept looking over at James Gunn when we were shooting, ‘Too much? Should I pull back?’ He’s like ‘No, more, go for it!’

Audiences got a glimpse of Benicio del Toro’s The Collector in one of the post-credits sequences in Thor: The Dark World. Del Toro’s over-the-top performance as one of the Elders of the Universe could be just a taste of what we’ll see from the villains in Guardians. Ronan is one of the members of the Accuser Corps, the Kree Empire’s group of military governors and jurists. In the movie, he’s one of Thanos’ henchmen, but in the comic book, he slowly grows more noble and heroic. We’ll have to wait to see if any of this comes across.

Recently, Zoe Saldana opened up about how different Guardians of the Galaxy will be, when compared to the other movies in Marvel’s canon. All the characters in the cosmic movie are ostensibly villains, but to varying degrees. She compared some of the characters to Robin Hood in that respect. The real superheroes in the cosmic film are Rhomann Dey and Nova Prime of the Nova Corps, who can be compared to the likes of Agent Phil Coulson and Nick Fury.

According to Gunn, the story follows “a U.S. pilot who ends up in space in the middle of a universal conflict and goes on the run with futuristic ex-cons who have something everyone wants.” Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Benicio del Toro, Lee Pace, Karen Gillan, Djimon Hounsou, Michael Rooker, Olivia Lovibond, John C. Reilly, and Glenn Close, star in Guardians of the Galaxy, which hits theaters everywhere on August 1, 2014.