Wonder Woman: Here's What Chemist Dr. Maru Looks Like Without That Mask

There are a few notable bad guys floating around in Wonder Woman — the German army, Ludendorff (Danny Huston), etc. — but the most mysterious supervillain is evil WWI chemist Dr. Maru. Fans of the comics will know her as Doctor Poison (which some of the soldiers off-handedly dub her in the movie), and this version of the character makes it her mission to create a chemical weapon so strong that it would quite literally melt the faces off their opposition. Her experiments leave her with a deformity on the lower half of her face, leaving her hidden behind a facial prosthetic for most of the film. Even still, I couldn't help feeling that I'd seen her somewhere before.

Although Dr. Maru is in league with the Germans, she's actually played by Spanish actress Elena Anaya. Her first feature debut was as a young girl in the 1996 Spanish drama África, which eventually led to a critically acclaimed performance in 2001's Sex and Lucia. From there she scored roles in a few mainstream English-language films like Van Helsing (as vampire Aleera) and the 2007 romantic comedy In the Land of Women and with Patricia Clarkson in 2009's Cairo Time.

More recently, she played Vera Cruz in the truly terrifying (and highly underrated, in my opinion) horror film The Skin I Live In in 2011, alongside Antonio Banderas. In 2016 she popped up in The Infiltrator with Bryan Cranston and Diane Kruger, which follows a US Customs official's journey to uncover a money laundering scheme involving drug lord Pablo Escobar. She appears as Gloria Alcaino (pictured below), the wife of real-life drug ring leader Roberto Baez-Alcaino.

Fortunately for Anaya, it doesn't look like her next role involves wearing any type of mask. If you can't get enough of her, you'll be able to see her next in 2017's The Summit, about a scandal involving the president of Argentina.