GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY - New Casting and Villain Revealed
Actress Ophelia Lovibond has been cast in a supporting role in James Gunn's highly anticipated Marvel space adventure Guardians of the Galaxy. According to THR, she will play an "aide to a near-immortal being called The Collector, who gathers artifacts and beings in the hopes of saving them from a foretold galactic annihilation." This is the first time I've heard that The Collector would be a part of the movie. We previously heard The Controller was also going to be a villain.
Lovibond joins Chris Pratt as Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord, Dave Bautista as Drax the Destroyer, Michael Rooker as Yondu, and Zoe Saldana as Gamora. They also still need to cast Groot and Rocket Raccoon. I'm not that familiar with Lovibond, but she's had parts in films such as Mr. Popper’s Penguins and No Strings Attached.
The movie is scheduled to start shooting in June, and it's set to be released on August 1st, 2014. For those of you not familiar with The Collector here's some info from Marvel:
Like all the Elders of the Universe, the origin of the Collector is lost in antiquity. What is known is that he is one of the oldest living beings in the universe, having been among the first of the universe's races to become sentient in the wake of the Big Bang. Virtually immortal, the Collector spent the first millennia of his existence with his wife and daughter on the tranquil world he chose as his home base. When their daughter had grown to maturity and left them, the Collector's wife died of mysterious causes. The Collector was unprepared for her demise: he had thought her as immortal as well. In meditation, he realized that an important factor in an Elder's immortality is the will to live, and his wife had simply lost hers.
Determined not to succumb to his wife's malady, the Collector meditated upon what he might do to give his life meaning. In a vision, he foresaw that beings of great power would arise one day determined to destroy all life in the universe. To prevent this from happening, he decided to devote his life to collecting living beings and artifacts from throughout the known universe, and placing them in safekeeping. As a fail safe if what he foresaw came to pass, he could repopulate the universe and bequeath to them the knowledge and culture of the past.
Building himself a large starship, the Collector set forth, stopping at every inhabited world he found to acquire a sample of their finest achievements as well as living representatives of the world's life-forms. In a matter of years, his ship was completely filled, and the Collector was forced to suspend his mission in order to build expanded facilities for his permanent collection. With the aid of robo-mechanics acquired from the planet Cron, the Collector converted several uninhabited planets into giant museums, and transferred his collection there. Every time his ship's hold was filled, he would return to the museum-worlds to deposit his recent acquisitions. At present, the Collector has filled ten museum-worlds with artifacts from a hundred thousand planets.