The villain list for ‘Iron Man 3’ is getting longer as Variety is reporting that James Badge Dale has signed on to guest star in the Marvel Film.

Dale is a familiar face to audiences as he’s guest starred in ’24’ and ‘The Black Donnellys’ as well as starred in ‘Rubicon’ and the miniseries ‘The Pacific.’ He also recently wrapped an appearance in the Brad Pitt film ‘World War Z.’

In ‘Iron Man 3,’ Dale will be playing the role of Eric Savin. In the Marvel comics, he’s a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel in charge of Project Ultra. When he injures himself by stepping on a land mine, he undergoes cybernetic surgery  and is transformed into Coldblood.  He gains new artificial limbs, a mechanical left eye, built in guns and some heavy duty body armor enough to give Iron Man a run for his money. Needless to say, Coldblood is not a nice guy.

While it’s not certain that the movie will be following the same storyline from what‘s in the comic books, we do know that the film will borrow elements from Warren Ellis’ six issue ‘Iron Man: Extremis’ series and will focus on the spread of a virus through nanotechnology. It is interesting to note that Guy Pearce has already been cast as geneticist Aldrich Killian who created the new form of nanotechnology. See the connection?

With Pearce, Ben Kingsley, and now Dale all playing villains, hopefully ‘Iron Man 3’ won’t succumb to the same hole that ‘Iron Man 2’ did with too many villains and not enough story depth. Rebecca Hall has also signed on as a “sexy scientist” but we don’t know if she’ll be a femme fatale or just someone Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) has to worry about stealing Tony Stark’s affection.

Production on ‘Iron Man 3’ is slated to begin this month then will move onto China later in the summer. Disney already has the film scheduled for release on May 3, 2013. I’m sure more details will be forthcoming as filming progresses but so far the film sounds promising!