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.
