Here's What Ronan The Accuser From The MCU Looks Like In Real Life

James Gunn's "Guardians of the Galaxy" turned a team that was light years away from Marvel's A-list teams into one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's absolute hottest groups that can comfortably rub shoulders with the Avengers themselves. Since the movie acts as the team's origin story, it's tasked with introducing the audiences to Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax (Dave Bautista), Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), and Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), as well as the many supporting characters in the vast galaxy they guard (for want of a better word). With so many anti-hero pieces to juggle, it's clear that the villain has to pose a significant threat, yet he has to be fairly easy to characterize. 

Enter Ronan the Accuser, a fanatic Kree who only wants to gain ultimate power that would allow him to follow up his accusations with literally planet-destroying force. From his unique black-and-blue look to his association with the greater-scale big bad Thanos (Josh Brolin), Ronan's a perfect threat for the protagonists to unite against. But what does the imposing villain look like out of costume? Here's what Ronan the Accuser from the MCU looks like in real life.

Technically, you can see Ronan the Accuser without his makeup in "Captain Marvel," which takes place before the Kree fanatic started scoring a solid "I'll paint my face and use an Infinity Stone to become a world-destroying terrorist" on the sliding scale of radicalism. However, even that may not be enough to recognize actor Lee Pace under the blue paint and the heavy, armored uniform that wouldn't look out of place in a "Conan the Barbarian" movie.

Out of costume, Pace is a considerably slimmer and happier presence than the perma-grumpy and surprisingly easily confused Kree warlord. To put things in context, the actor has played a similarly stuffy authority figure in a big-budget movie universe – namely, King Thranduil in "The Hobbit" trilogy – but the elven lord's fine features and elegant costume look much closer to Pace's own visage than the heavily made-up MCU villain. It probably goes without saying that Pace's smile is significantly more pearly than the black-toothed Ronan's, too. 

Pace fully recognizes Ronan's partially self-imposed outlandish look and says that the arduous makeup process meant that both he and Ronan wore a mask. "He's got blue skin but on top of that, he's painted this fearsome mask because that's how he wants to present himself to the world." Pace described Ronan in an interview with Screen Slam.