Marvel Leak Reveals The Leader’s Original Captain America: Brave New World Design

In Julius Onah’s 2025 superhero flick “Captain America: Brave New World” — the 35th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — Tim Blake Nelson reprises his role as Samuel Sterns, a brilliant scientist with a massive brain and an evil scheme at hand. Sterns had previously been seen in Louis Leterrier’s 2008 film “The Incredible Hulk,” wherein he suffered a head wound and was knocked onto a laboratory floor. Gamma-irradiated blood extracted from Bruce Banner dripped into Sterns’ head wound, and his skull instantly began to swell.

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In “Brave New World,” we finally see the result of Sterns’ skull-swelling: he had been transformed into a hyper-intelligent villain. Known as The Leader in Hulk comics, Stern had greenish skin, clouded eyes, and an outsize head with brain-like crevices in it. He claimed to be so smart that he could predict the outcome of anything. The “skull-brain” look for the character was a far cry from his comic book origins, where the Leader had bright green skin (similar to the Hulk’s) and a giant, smooth, round, alien-like cranium. 

It seems, though, that the “skull-brain” was a last-minute redesign, and the MCU’s Leader was initially going to look a little bit more like his big-headed comic book counterpart. Onah explained in an interview with Variety that he wanted to change the design to highlight the character’s inner monstrosity, giving audiences an immediate sense of why Sterns wanted retribution for his enormous brain mutation. 

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Thanks to a recent posting on Instagram, however, audiences can now finally see the original “big head” design that the filmmakers came up with. Longtime Marvel makeup artist (and Emmy winner) Shutchia Tym Buacharern posted a few behind-the-scenes photos from “Brave New World,” including a picture of himself play-kissing a rubber Leader head constructed for the movie. The picture has since been removed from his account, but it has already proliferated on other social media.

Shutchia Tym Buacharern served as lead actor Anthony Mackie’s personal makeup artist on the set of “Brave New World,” and had previously been the makeup department head on the Marvel film “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” “Captain Marvel,” and “Black Panther.” He got his start as a makeup artist on two of the “Emmanuelle in Space” movies, a series of low-budget soft-core sci-fi flicks for Roger Corman. This should only inspire respect. 

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In the photo above, Buacharern is laying a smooch on a pop head for the Leader, and one can see that the original design was very, very different. It seems that Tim Black Nelson was, once upon a time, going to be outfitted with a giant head appliance, goatee, and wig, leaving the character looking more human. 

As Onah explained, though, the smooth, more comics-accurate design wasn’t communicating the monstrosity of the character enough. A new practical appliance was invented, and the Leader was given a craggy skull-brain. Onah also acknowledged in the Variety interview that he enhanced the skull-brain scariness with some subtle CGI (perhaps to account for the character’s glowing green eyes):

“We started off with an entirely practical version of it. You still see a lot of that practical work, in terms of prosthetics and paint stuff of that sort.[…] I remember one day on set, somebody jumped when they saw him. And then when we put it together in the movie, I wanted to push it even further […] So we did enhance with visual effects, just to push it to that edge of something that, hopefully, wasn’t too off-putting. But, again, helped you understand emotionally what was driving him.” 

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Reviews of “Brave New World” were generally negative, including /Film’s own, but the complaints were less about the film’s rejection of comic book fealty to the Leader, and more about its generally cowardly politics. Would the big-head Leader have made the film work better? We can only speculate.