UPDATE: Our own Eric Eisenberg has chimed in to point out an interesting wrinkle, which is that Deadline refers to the character as Ronan Dey... who doesn't exist. Who does exist, though, is Rhomann Dey, the character that Hitfix first reported Reilly would be playing. Is there some kind of game of Telephone getting played and mixing everyone up? We don't know for sure yet... but the matter may not be quite settled as to who Reilly is playing, so stay tuned for when we learn more.
UPDATE #2: Deadline has corrected their article and admitted that they made a mistake. John C. Reilly will indeed by playing Rhomann Dey in Guardians of the Galaxy, as previously reported The original story is below.
Marvel Studios started building their fortune by hiring unknown or otherwise cheap actors like Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth and Robert Downey Jr. (hey, he was cheap at the time) to headline their franchises. As they move on to Phase Two and build bigger vaults to hold their riches, though, they're apparently more willing than ever to shell out for some big names.
And Guardians of the Galaxy-- an outer-space superhero movie starring a heroic raccoon-- might need the big names to help sell it to audiences who aren't quite ready for the transition. They've already got the likes of Benicio del Toro, Glenn Close and Zoe Saldana on board, and now the role has finally been revealed for one more big name, John C. Reilly. According to Deadline Reilly is playing Ronan "The Accuser" Dey, and I really can't do better to describe him than to lift this information from Wikipedia:
Ronan was born on the planet Hala, the capital of the Kree Empire in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Ronan is a member of the alien Kree race and a member of the Accuser Corps, who are the Kree equivalent of military governors and jurists. His rise through the ranks was extraordinary, and he eventually became the third-most powerful being in the Kree Empire. The Supreme Intelligence appointed him "Supreme Accuser of the Kree Empire," and in this role he is known simply as "Ronan the Accuser".
No, I don't really know what much of that means either-- seriously, I'm still not quite over the main characters in this movie including a raccoon and a man who looks like a tree. Deadline does note, though, that in some versions of the comics Ronan is the son of Thanos, whom we first met as the purple bad guy at the end of The Avengers. We've been promised that Thanos will be part of the action in Avengers 2, but Thanos's role in Guardians is currently much fuzzier. You can guess that Ronan The Accuser makes a confirmed link… but I think we've all learned from Marvel that the second you assume you know what they're up to, they change it up entirely.
Guardians of the Galaxy arrives August 1 next year.
