Gamma-green skin, oversized cranium, and orange jumpsuit are the hallmarks of Samuel Sterns, the big-brained Hulk villain better known as the Leader. But when the super-genius supervillain returned in Captain America: Brave New World — 17 years after first appearing in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, where the gamma-irradiated blood of Bruce Banner seeped into an open wound on his head — Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) looked little like his comic book counterpart. Instead of the elongated head and handlebar mustache from his earliest appearances, the movie leaned into the gamma mutate look that exposed Sterns’ bulbous brain.
Leaked merchandise showed the Leader to have a more comic-accurate appearance. But by the time the movie underwent a series of reshoots — Nelson filmed his scenes twice, once with the enlarged noggin and again with the finalized design — the Leader lost his goatee and full head of hair, replaced with glowing green eyes and a deformed cranium.
New art book Marvel Studios’ Captain America: Brave New World – The Art Of The Movie (via Art Book Collector) reveals the various permutations that the original Leader design underwent from development to screen, including a version resembling the character as he appeared in the Peter David-Todd McFarlane Incredible Hulk comic run.
Artist Ian Joyner, Visual Development Supervisor at Marvel Studios whose credits include Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Spider-Man: No Way Home, approached the Leader with a head that was distended to an extreme degree to the point of requiring a specially augmented suit.
“The weight of the head would be so much that he might need tech to relieve the pain that he would be suffering,” Joyner says in the art book. “I was also playing with hair a little to see if we could incorporate the widow’s peak in the classic comic book version, all the way to him being completely bald, really showing that his brain has taken over.”
Besides an apparatus attached to the suit to support his enlarged head, the Leader might have stabilized his brain with an assortment of tech. In another unused design, the Leader resembled the more monstrous, body-horror version from Al Ewing’s Immortal Hulk. “One of my favorite movies is The Thing. So whenever I get to play in that world, I have a lot of fun,” Joyner says. “With these movies, we run a gamut. You’re always asking, ‘How gross can you really go with this stuff?’”
“We don’t necessarily always want to lean into the full-on body horror, but I was delighted with the more recent comic book interpretation of the Leader in the Immortal Hulk run — where he literally absorbs people’s brains, intelligence, and souls and everything. My idea was, like, could we actually just do something that crazy?” Joyner recalls, adding that he considered that “the Leader might be able to control minds with his brain and sucking the brains out of other people.”
In the end, the Leader lacked the telepathic powers and telekinetic abilities of his comic book counterpart, with the spy thriller opting to have Sterns use his super-human mental acumen to calculate probabilities and outsmart the likes of U.S. President Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford), transforming him into the rampaging Red Hulk, and Sam Wilson’s Captain America (Anthony Mackie).
Marvel’s Captain America: Brave New World is now streaming on Disney+ and available to rent or buy on digital. Marvel Studios’ Captain America: Brave New World – The Art Of The Movie is on sale July 8.
