10 Best Side Characters In The MCU
9. Pepper Potts (Iron Man)
From the very first MCU film, Pepper has been busy saving Tony Stark's butt. When we first meet her, she is Tony's secretary/personal assistant who gets little to no appreciation from Tony but still performs her thankless job anyway.
She goes on to save his life multiple times in that film alone. Later in the series, in Iron Man 3, when she is kidnapped and made out to be the 'damsel in distress', it winds up being Pepper herself who saves Tony with her own newly-acquired superpowers. If it wasn't for Pepper, Tony Stark would have died at least a half-dozen times but she continuously refuses to let it happen.
On top of that, she is absolutely the foil that we as an audience need Tony Stark to go up against. As great as RDJ's performance of Stark is, he is a narcissistic a**hole, through and through. Pepper brings out the best in him and makes him pay for it when his best can't be found. She was completely absent from Civil War because Stark had fallen down such a particularly dark rabbit hole that she couldn't stand it anymore and left him. In the end, once he had gotten his head screwed on straight, she came back to him and even teased some impending nuptuals in Spider-Man: Homecoming.