Thomas Kretschmann has well and truly gone over to the dark side. By that, we don’t mean he’s been spotted in public kicking puppies or leaving scathing Internet comments. He’s playing two villains on screen in a row,adding the primary antagonist of Hitman reboot **Agent 47 to his current gig as Baron Wolfgang von Strucker in The Avengers: Age Of Ultron.
With Rupert Friend taking over from the late Paul Walker as the titular agent, an assassin who discovers a conspiracy, Kretschmann will be Le Cierq, the chairman of Syndicate International, bent on creating an army of unstoppable agents. Aleksander Bach has the cameras rolling already in Berlin and Zachary Quinto is playing one of the other thorns in Agent 47’s side.
From the sounds of it, Kretschmann will be heading directly from working with Joss Whedon on the Avengers sequel to the German set of the Hitman film, which Fox is hoping can kick off a new franchise, since the new movie will carry over some elements from the 2007 effort. Since Kretschmann is only playing the secondary villain in Ultron (James Spader is the Big Bad), he can clearly split his time between the two. Age Of Ultron, meanwhile, will be out on May 1, 2015.