How The MCU Previously Depicted The Mandarin
The Mandarin’s influence in the MCU goes all the way back to 2008’s Iron Man, as the terrorist organization that kidnapped Tony Stark was called The Ten Rings, in reference to the weapons The Mandarin wears on his fingers in the Marvel Comics universe. However, it wasn’t until Iron Man 3 that The Mandarin finally appeared in the MCU… or at least that’s how it initially looked. In reality, Ben Kingsley was actually playing Trevor Slattery, a has-been actor who was hired by Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian to play The Mandarin for the public in order to take the blame for the accidents caused by A.I.M.’s experiments. Towards the end of the threequel, Killian declared that he was The Mandarin, but he had nothing to strengthen that claim other than having a dragon tattoo on his chest.