He hasn’t featured in any of the film’s trailers thus far (none that I’ve seen anyway), so here’s your first look (full image below) at Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as one of the film’s lead villains, known as Kurse, in Thor: Dark World (the sequel to last year’s blockbuster for Paramount Pictures & Marvel Studios).

Who’s Kurse?

Thanks to Marvel, here’s a summary:

The being called Kurse was originally Algrim the Strong, one of the Dark Elves of the extra dimensional realm of Svartalfheim who served the Dark Elves’ ruler, Malekith the Accursed. Malekith had told Algrim he had chosen him to defeat Thor. But while Thor and Algrim fought each other, Malekith ordered that a pitfall be opened beneath their feet. Thor and Algrim fell down a great chasm toward a lake of molten lava. Thor summoned his magic hammer, which carried him to safety, but Algrim plunged into the magma. The magma’s tremendous heat left Algrim on the brink of death. He would have been killed outright except that his enchanted armor protected him from the magma’s full effects, and that his desire for vengeance for Thor gave him the will to live. In fact, the shock of the intense pain the magma caused him rendered Algrim amnesiac; not remembering the real reason why he fell into the lava, he knew only that Thor was somehow to blame.

And now our boy, now known as Kurse, probably wants revenge. You know how that goes… apparently, driven insane by hatred, Kurse wreaks havoc in Manhattan as he searches for Thor.

There’s a lot more where that came from, so feel free to head over to Marvel’s website for the full story of Kurse/Algrim.

It looks like Akinnuoye-Agbaje will play both – when he was known as Algrim, and later, after he almost suffered a magma death, as Kurse.

How much of the above story will be featured in the film isn’t yet known.

Chris Hemsworth of course returns as the Norse god, with Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hiddleston, Idris Elba and Kat Dennings all reprising their roles.

Thor: Dark World is set for a November 8, 2013 release.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje can currently be seen in George Tillman Jr’s The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete. He recently joined the cast of Sony Pictures’ Annie, a reimagining of the Broadway musical, which stars Quvenzhané Wallis as the title characters, and will also appear in Paul W.S. Anderson’s upcoming actioner Pompeii.