The 'Iron Man 3' actor shared the news with ET on the red carpet at 'Shang-Chi's premiere.
One of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings' secrets has been revealed early, as Sir Ben Kingsley made a surprise appearance at Monday's red carpet premiere and confirmed he is indeed making his return to the MCU in the movie.
"As you just saw, I was talking to Kevin Feige," Kingsley told ET's Matt Cohen, "and thanks to Kevin and Robert Downey Jr. and Drew Pearce and Shane Black, I am in this movie and I'm a member of the Marvel family, because their welcome on Iron Man 3 was so astonishing and generous that I'm still with Marvel again. And I'm delighted to be here!"
As MCU devotees will remember, Kingsley appeared in 2013's Iron Man 3 as the leader of the Ten Rings terrorist organization, The Mandarin. (The Ten Rings has been name-dropped in the MCU since the very first Iron Man in 2008.) That movie revealed its Mandarin to be a phony, a role played by Kingsley's out-of-work actor, Trevor Slattery.
Trevor Slattery returned in a short film, All Hail the King, in which he's broken out of prison by an agent of the real Ten Rings (Scoot McNairy). "There's somebody who wants to meet you," Slattery is told. "You took his name. And now he wants it back."
Now, it appears, Trevor Slattery will finally come face-to-face with the real leader of the Ten Rings in Shang-Chi. Tony Leung's Wenwu is that character, with Simu Liu as his son, the titular superhero and master of martial arts. Kingsley, meanwhile, is joined by fellow returnees like Tim Roth's Abomination, who hasn't been seen since 2008's The Incredible Hulk, and Benedict Wong, reprising his role as Wong.
"The thing is, I don't even know the script! They're kind of a bit secretive here," Wong said at the premiere. "It's a bit like in the 16th century, in Shakespeare times, you would just get your scenes and that would be it, so I'm looking forward to seeing it myself."
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is in theaters on Sept. 3.
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