Captain America - Civil War: 10 Characters Martin Freeman Could Be Playing
5. Dell Rusk
One of the biggest unanswered questions in the MCU is what happened to the Red Skull. He clearly didn’t die at the end of Captain America: The First Avenger, and it appeared that the Tesseract transported him somewhere in space. As a result, fans keep waiting for him to return in some way.
The Red Skull is famous for hiding in plain sight. Case in point: Dell Rusk, the fictional secretary of defence who is secretly Captain America’s greatest foe in disguise. Skull has both a fondness for elaborate masks and taking over people's minds with help from the cosmic cube. And to him, there could be no greater victory than to destroy America from the inside out
Many thought Alexander Pierce was going to inhabit this role and that the Red Skull would have taken over his mind, and they could still do something similar with Freeman. They tried going with an imposing German Nazi before, and it didn’t really work, so why not completely flip the script? Just like a potential Mordo or Osborn appearance, he wouldn’t need to be the main villain, just lurking in the background and setting up future conflict.