Drea de Matteo to play a superpowered foe on Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Drea de Matteo will be joining Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. this year as a superpowered enemy with an axe to grind against the titular agency. De Matteo, who won an Emmy for her performance as Adriana La Cerva on The Sopranos, will be joining the ABC comic book show as Karla Faye Gideon, apparently an accomplice of Kyle MacLachlan’s villain Calvin Zabo. Unlike Edward James Olmos, who will be joining the show’s third season as original character Robert Gonzales, de Matteo‘s character actually has an origin in Marvel’s comics—although any true believers in the audience who remember her probably deserve a No-Prize.
Gideon is a minor, unpowered character from the 2005 miniseries Daredevil: Redemption, in which superpowered attorney Matt Murdock defends the man accused of murdering her son Bradley. We’ll have to wait for Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. to return in March to see if de Matteo’s character retains any of that backstory, or if ABC just has a big spreadsheet of Marvel character names to pull from when they need a new bad guy to throw into the mix. Either way, it’s good news for Doctor Strange’s dentist and that guy who owes the Hulk five bucks, since they’ll presumably appear on the show as villains (Tooth Hot To Handle and The Malevolent Moocher, respectively) sometime in its seventh season.