Dr. Zander Rice is the main antagonist of Logan. He was a genetic scientist and the head of Alkali-Transigen, a medical technologies firm responsible for experimentation on young mutants. He was portrayed by Richard E. Grant.
History[]
When Rice was a child, his father worked for a government black ops program known as Weapon X. Rice's father was killed in 1983 after a group of young mutants (who would become the X-Men) escaped capture and released their Weapon X specimen Wolverine.
Decades later, Rice himself had become the head of the Transigen Project and was working to curb random mutantcy in the human population. Using genetically modified food, Rice spread a virus through the population that ended natural mutant births. Following this success, he sought to create new mutants that he would then sell as living weapons. Rice's experiments were harsh and unnecessarily cruel, though he prohibited his staff from showing the mutant children any degree of empathy, seeing the subjects as mere products.
One of Rice's subjects, labelled X-23, was created from the DNA of Wolverine and possessed similar abilities as well as his own animal-like ferocity. From this child's DNA, Rice would perfect his cloning process and create X-24, a clone of Wolverine that he could control. He ordered the termination of X-23 and the other remaining children, but one of his staff - Gabriela Lopez - staged a breakout from the Transigen facility in Mexico and most of the children escaped. Lopez would take X-23, renamed Laura, and try to find her genetic father Logan in hopes that he could protect them. Zander sent Donald Pierce and the Reavers to find and capture Laura, authorising the deployment of X-24 for the task.
Death[]
In North Dakota, as Rice and the Reavers attempted to round up the children trying to cross the border into Canada, he came face to face with Logan. Rice began explaining his plans to Logan, but the ageing X-Man did not care for the doctor's prattle and raised a gun at him, shooting him through the throat.