Jared Harris Is Excited By Speculation About His ‘Morbius’ Character, But He’s Still Shutting It Down

The first Morbius trailer contained, well, a lot. Jared Leto vamped out while making his move from the DCEU (where he played the not-well-received Joker in Suicide Squad) to Sony’s Marvel Universe. Leto portrays Michael Morbius, and we saw a flash of Matt Smith’s baddie, but even more mysteriously, the trailer also showed Jared Harris as an expositional character of sorts. He appears to be a mentor to Morbius, who unwittingly turns himself into The Living Vampire in the Spider-Man spinoff movie.

Naturally, speculation ran wild because Harris’ character still remains unnamed on IMDb and elsewhere, and certain fan forums began to speculate that he’ll be playing the a classic Spider-Man villain, Dr. Otto Octavius, a.k.a. “Doctor Octopus.” As much as folks would enjoy (or not) seeing Harris with bizarre mechanical torso arms, however, this visual is not actually in the cards. As Harris told Variety at Sunday night’s SAGs ceremony, he’s not picking up the Doc Ock mantle:

“No. I love the imagination that the fans have, it’s exciting for me to think about the imagination that that fans have. But yeah no, it’s not.”

There’s something to be said about not overstuffing yet another comic book movie with far too many notorious characters from the source material. It already looks like (from the closing moments of the trailer) that Michael Keaton might be bringing his Vulture badness to the mix while asking Doc what’s up, so wouldn’t it be nice if Harris simply played a caring mentor I’d be alright with that, and this might ground the movie more because Leto’s prone to roll up in a big ball and fly around the set, chewing scenery. With all of that said, one also has to be prepared for any Jared Harris character to, well, die. He even recently admitted to The Guardian (while promoting Chernobyl) that his wife called it a “problem career-wise” that his characters keep biting the dust.

Morbid humor, man, ahead of Morbius‘ descent into theaters on July 31, 2020.