Star Trek: Beyond is hitting theaters very, very soon, and while we’ve seen plenty of the explosions it has to offer, its revelation that Sulu has a husband,, and a little bit about its plot, we still haven’t learned much about the film’s villain. Played by Idris Elba, his name is Krall and he’s part of a brand-new alien race, one that has never appeared in the Star Trek franchise before. A featurette focusing on Krall and his motivations was released, and it sheds a good bit of light on the character, featuring commentary from Elba, the film’s director Justin Lin, and Simon Pegg, who both stars in and co-wrote the film.
“Krall is very complex,” Elba says, “When you meet him, you go, ‘Oh, he’s a bad guy.'” But Pegg goes on to clarify that, “We wanted him to have a complex reason for his bad guy-ness.”
It seems that Krall will join the 2009 Star Trek‘s Nero and Into Darkness‘s Khan in the rebooted franchise’s tradition of villains that transcend cartoony villainy and instead have deeply empathetic motivations for their war on our heroes. The video also contains some great footage of Krall in action and it looks like he’ll be physical in a way we never really got from Eric Bana’s Nero and never really got believably from Benedict Cumberbatch’s Khan. With Lin’s history of making wonderfully well-crafted action films, you can bet that regardless of whether or not you agree with Krall’s motivations, it’ll be a whole lot of fun to watch him take on the Federation.
