The Mysterio of Jake Gyllenhaal
A ‘character actor in a leading man’s body,’ the Oscar-nominated actor has us wondering what might have been if he had been inclined to put his own sling on spidey
NOTE: The following story contains spoilers
Consider the notion of a multiverse — and within it, an alternate reality in which Jake Gyllenhaal played Spider-man.
In what will forever remain a “what if” scenario in our reality, the alt-gyllenhaal would have accepted Columbia Pictures’s offer to play the geeky web-slinger in 2004’s Spider-man 2 after messy contract negotiations led executives to consider booting Tobey Maguire from the franchise.
But we live in a universe where Maguire wound up reprising his role in the sequel — and good for him, as many consider it to be a top-tier Spider-man movie. Gyllenhaal took another route in his post-donnie Darko years, opting for dynamic, often eccentric roles in films such as Brokeback Mountain, Zodiac and, more recently, Nightcrawler, Okja and Velvet Buzzsaw. The Oscar nominee has increasingly become, as a casting director once said of Jude Law’s similarly intriguing career, a “character actor in a leading man’s body.”
It’s not that Gyllenhaal would’ve done poorly as Peter Parker, but rather that the role wouldn’t have made full use of his penchant for peculiarity.
Perhaps thanks to his odd sense of humour, he’s proved adept at playing sometimes-charming wackadoodles with a darkness to them. If he were to appear in a Spider-man movie, director
Jon Watts and Marvel executives realized, it would have to be as someone more cunning and deceptive. Someone like Quentin Beck, known to the masses as Mysterio.
Watts’s Spider-man: Far From Home, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s second Spidey flick, introduces Beck as a caped, fishbowl-helmeted hero who aids S.H.I.E.L.D.’S efforts to thwart destructive monsters called the Elementals. Beck tells the agents he’s the lone survivor of an alternate reality where the Elementals annihilated everyone, including his family, so he has arrived to prevent them from wreaking the same havoc on this Earth. S.H.I.E.L.D. loops in Spider-man (Tom Holland), and he teams up with Beck, whom Peter and his classmates later nickname Mysterio, to fight the Elementals throughout Europe.
From reading the comics or just the character’s name alone, most viewers know going in that Mysterio isn’t who he claims to be. The big twist arrives swiftly, set in a Prague bar where a clueless Peter decides to entrust Beck with E.D.I.T.H., an advanced virtual assistant embedded in a pair of Tony Stark’s sunglasses.
After Peter leaves, Beck hops up on the bar and discloses his true identity as a former Stark Industries engineer who felt unappreciated by the billionaire and who was eventually let go after being deemed unstable.
His eyes wide and outstretched arms like a showman’s, Beck turns to the other bar patrons, who are actually other disgruntled Stark Industries employees, and explains how they used drones and special-effects technology to create the Elementals so Mysterio can fight them, make himself out to be the world’s next greatest superhero (R.I.P. Tony) and receive the attention he so desperately craves.
No longer masquerading as a cryptic hero, Beck establishes himself to the audience as a manipulative maniac. Gyllenhaal fully leans into this personality, exaggerating his mannerisms and speaking in a frenzy as the actor playing another actor playing a superhero so different from himself.
Beck oscillates between stepping in as an older brother figure to Peter — not unlike the dynamic between the two actors during the wacky Far From Home press tour — and being a villain whose neuroticism is reminiscent of Gyllenhaal’s disturbed stringer from Nightcrawler, flamboyant TV zoologist from Okja and Peloton-and-pilates-alternating art critic from Velvet Buzzsaw. He plays both the very best and the absolute worst guy in the room as Beck, flip-flopping between the personas with ease. Elsewhere in the multiverse, alt-gyllenhaal ended up doing whatever it is that Tobey Maguire is currently doing. (Playing tons of poker, or something?) But we got the version of the versatile actor who wound up on the press tour with Holland and a trusty gold chain, singing hearty praise of Care Bears and passionately claiming that Jamaican rapper Sean Paul improves every song on which he appears.
How lucky we are!
Warning: This story contains spoilers for Spider-man: Far From Home.
Spider-man: Far From Home has been called the end of the Avengers’ Infinity Saga, but one key end-credits scene could be a major clue as to what the next big event at Marvel Studios might be.
The not-so-shocking Mysterio twist (did anyone think he wasn’t going to be the bad guy?) and the triumphant return of J. Jonah Jameson weren’t the biggest surprises in the Spider-man sequel. That honour goes to Talos and Co., a.k.a. the shape-shifting Skrulls who recently debuted in Captain Marvel. And they didn’t just pop up at the end of the film, but rather seem to have been in disguise as Nick Fury and Maria Hill for the entire movie.
As big a reveal as that was, it actually made Far From Home make a little more sense. Nick Fury seemed a little off for most of the movie — mainly because he fell for the deception of Mysterio for so long. You simply don’t get one over that easily on the real Fury, the know-it-all boss of the Avengers who is always one step ahead. Well, except for that one time he discovered that Hydra had secretly infiltrated his S.H.I.E.L.D. organization in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and that Hydra had been causing carefully calculated chaos for decades and turned Captain America’s long-thought-dead best friend Bucky into a ghost-assassin. But other than that, nothing gets by Fury.
It turns out the real Fury was in space with a colony of Skrulls, receiving updates from Talos on what was happening with Tony Stark’s heir apparent, Peter Parker/spider-man. So, when did the Fury/talos switch take place? Odds are that Fury and Captain Marvel reunited at Stark’s funeral in Avengers: Endgame and had a quick meeting to plan out the future. But what if the switch happened before that? Let’s not forget, we just learned about Fury and Captain Marvel’s first meeting in the early ’90s (where both eventually became allies of the Skrulls) in her debut movie in March.
The idea of a multiverse, which was hinted at by Mysterio in Far From Home’s trailers, was more or less eliminated when it was revealed that Mysterio (we think) made it up. For now, that puts to rest the fan theories that Secret Wars (a story that deals with multiple universes) could be the big Marvel comic book saga used for the next Avengers get-together.
But that Skrull kicker wouldn’t be in this Spider-man film if it weren’t meant to have huge ramifications.
Perhaps if not Secret Wars, a Secret Invasion? The Secret Invasion story was about the Skrulls secretly replacing the identities of multiple Marvel heroes in a plot to take over the Earth. While that goes against the current (and surprising) MCU narrative of the Skrulls actually being the good guys, it could possibly be a source of Marvel Studios inspiration now that the alien race plays such a big part in the new films.
Is every Skrull a good person, though? Can we put our faith in Talos? Fury and Captain Marvel, the most powerful Avenger of all, seem to trust them.