Over the years, Jake Gyllenhaal has been connected to many major superhero roles. Ever since there’s been rumblings that Ben Affleck wasn’t happy in the part of Batman, people have been touting him as a potential replacement. And, perhaps most famously, Gyllenhaal was all lined up to take over for Tobey Maguire in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 when it looked like they were going to recast after a pay dispute. All this means that it was slightly eyebrow-raising when he took the part of third-rate villain Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home.
Mysterio’s never been a particularly serious member of Spidey’s rogues gallery, generally being treated as a blustering joke who’s in over his head. And yet, in the first trailer for Far From Home, Gyllenhaal looked genuinely awesome. But why exactly did he take the role in the first place?
In a recent interview with The LA Times, the actor revealed why he just couldn’t say no to the part, explaining:
He’s a great character…you know it was one of those things that people have asked me for a number of years, ‘Are you going to do / do you want to do a movie like that, or if you were asked to would you?’ And my response has always been, particularly since being at Sundance [where] so many of the stories [are]…character-driven and that has always been my desire, to find something in that space that seems to match my skill and also what I love and my own honesty. And it just so happened that it does with that part. So, I’m glad that people feel excited about it.
The fan consensus after seeing the trailer is that Mysterio will be trying to make the public see himself as a new and powerful superhero, and the various giant monsters we witness in the preview are special effects that he’s conjured up to give himself something to do battle with. I also heard a further neat-sounding theory that one of the reasons Gyllenhaal was cast is that he’s so handsome. The idea goes that the face we see in the trailers will itself be a special effect in order to hide Mysterio’s ‘real’ face, which is pretty far from the hunky Jake Gyllenhaal in the comics.
We’ll probably get a better look at Mysterio in future Spider-Man: Far From Home trailers, but if there really is going to be a twist like that, I sure hope they keep it under wraps for as long as possible.