Marvel One-Shot: First Look at Ben Kingsley's Mandarin encore (PHOTOS) | Inside Movies

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How does this fit in to the entire Marvel mythology? In the feature film, we learn that Kingsley’s version of The Mandarin is a front set up by Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), but here he is surprised to learn there are people out there who still believe in the figure he was impersonating.

What it’s doing on that level is, it reiterates a bunch of stuff that actually Shane [Black, director and co-writer of Iron Man 3] and I said in our interviews around the movie. There’s lots of exposition in lots of different cuts of Iron Man 3 that, in the end, kind of got snubbed out. It’s kind of said in Iron Man 3 but very briefly, Aldrich essentially took a thing that was real, historically real and culturally real, and co-opted it for his own means — essentially co-opting an ancient terrorist concept. What [All Hail the King] does is show that everything in Iron Man 1 [involving the terrorist group] was canon all along any way. We kind of knew The Ten Rings were a real terrorist cell.

We’re getting into spoiler territory. But I think it’s safe to say the short tries to show that although Trevor doesn’t seem to realize what he was doing, his actions had larger consequences in the real world.

Absolutely! One of the interesting things about Trevor is, and this is something that we can talk about up front and what was important for the short is, Trevor is funny when everything else around him is serious. Trevor is a broad character, but his largest than life nature is absolutely a reality for a bunch of actors I know. The idea of Trevor feeling like he’s genuinely getting punished is kind of a thing that felt like a good starting point. Marvel movies often do this, when they play with both the bright colors of comic books and the reality of it.

I know All Hail the King is a post-script to Iron Man 3, but I have to say it also feels like a setup for Iron Man 4 — if there is one someday.

Oh, it couldn’t possibly. [Laughs.] I think short movies in general, whether they’re Marvel ones or not, you kind of want them to feel like they’re opening you up to a bigger world. Yeah, I definitely think there are – the non-spoiler way for me to say it — by the end of the short, there are definitely a lot of exciting other places that are brought up in it that could then go in the Marvel universe. You know, whether that’s an Iron Man movie or another one going into Phase Two or Three.