If you’re one of the three to four people remaining who has yet to watch Spider-Man: Brand New Day, we’ll drop a warning after this introduction and keep things vague up here. But if you have seen the movie, or if you’ve already heard the biggest spoilers, you may proceed to hear what director Destin Daniel Cretton said about Brand New Day‘s shrouded-in-secrecy villain, who’s played by Stranger Things star Sadie Sink.
It’s Jean Grey, and her appearance in Brand New Day paves the way for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s eager embrace of the X-Men. But beyond bringing a key piece into the franchise, Cretton told Deadline there were some deeper reasons for bringing the uniquely talented mutant into the story now.
“We wanted to get away from having a villain who just felt typical because this was really Peter Parker’s journey,” Cretton explained. “We wanted a villain who reflected what he was going through. Even before Jean Grey came up, the idea was that the reveal would be that she was just a young telepath. At the time, we didn’t fully know who we could use because we hadn’t talked to [Marvel head] Kevin [Feige] yet. We were going through different options, and Jean Grey was clearly a very good one.”
The Brand New Day team did some comics research to figure out how to present this take on Jean Grey, especially given the context. The answer came when they discovered a run that explored Jean’s backstory of losing her sister—the sort of grief Peter Parker can absolutely relate to.
“To us, both characters experienced very clear trauma and had loved ones taken from them,” the director said. “The difference is that Jean really had one person as her community, and that person was taken away. Peter, on the other hand, had a community that rallied around him after Aunt May was killed … That became our north star too later on for: How do we build that throughout the movie, and how does it culminate in a scene that’s really just two people sitting on a bed talking?”
As for casting Sink, who appeared in Cretton’s 2017 The Glass Castle, it was seemingly a no-brainer. “When we started talking about the character of Jean Grey and her name came up, it was just like, ‘Oh, hell yeah,'” Cretton said. “Coming into this, she was kind of the outsider entering a cast of actors who all know each other and are all very good, and she just killed it. She’s so emotionally present, she’s so professional, and when it’s time to really go there, she goes there.”
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
