Here’s why I’m the most gullible mark in the universe: every time Marvel kills off one of their characters, I think to myself, “Gosh, I’ll miss that character! What with them being gone forever and all!” You’d think I’d never read a comic book in my entire life. If the first rule of sci fi is that a character isn’t dead unless you see a body, the first rule of comics is that no character ever dies, ever, for any reason. (If they do, the only character who stays dead is Uncle Ben.) They always find a way to come back, whether it’s through multiverse hijinks, science gone haywire, or just straight up reincarnation. Case in point: Heimdall might be returning to the MCU!
You’ll recall that Heimdall (Idris Elba), Thor’s close friend and the all-seeing guardian of the Bifrost, bites it at the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War, when Thanos attacks the Asgardian refugee ship to get the Tesseract. In that scene, Heimdall uses the last of his strength to send Hulk to Earth before Thanos stabs him. Of the other characters who died in the Infinity Saga (not blipped, but died died), Loki, Vision, and Gamora were promptly resurrected after a fashion and are now back to running around the MCU, good as new.
After the Infinity Saga, Heimdall makes a surprise cameo at the end of Thor: Love and Thunder, when Jane Foster dies and goes to Valhalla. Heimdall greets Jane as she appears, thanks her for helping his son Axl, and welcomes her to the afterlife. At the time, fans took the cameo as a moment of closure for his character, since he was so beloved. However, a new interview with Idris Elba seems to indicate that it might have been the beginning of Heimdall’s return to the MCU.
Idris Elba: “There may be something cooking”
On Thursday night, Syfy Wire interviewed Elba about his new movie Beast. During the interview, Syfy asked Elba about his Love and Thunder cameo, and if Heimdall might ever come back. Here’s what Elba said:
“Heimdall is a beloved character, I love playing him. There may be something cooking … I don’t know [what it is]. I would tell you if I did. Well, probably not…”
Superhero media usually doesn’t worry too much about character resurrections making sense, but bringing Heimdall back would be especially easy for Marvel. For one thing, the current overarching MCU storyline is the Multiverse Saga. We’ve already seen variants and alternate versions of multiple characters, and we know that more, like Kang, are on the way. We could see a dozen different Heimdalls if Marvel felt like it.
Secondly, Marvel has established that all the dead Asgardians are kicking it in Valhalla, so who’s to say they couldn’t drop by the living world? After all, Odin already did it in Ragnarok.
Will Heimdall return? We’ll have to wait and see as the Multiverse Saga continues to play out. In the meantime, you can catch Elba in Beast, now playing in theaters.
(image: Marvel)
