Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterious ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ Character Was Almost Something Very Different

Marvel Studios

WARNING: This article contains massive spoilers for Spider-Man: Far From Home.

Avengers: Endgame may have been big enough to cause superhero fatigue, but if Spider-Man: Far From Home‘s continued box office success is any indication, that’s not the case at all. Besides, it’s a wonderful and crowd-pleasing Spider-Man film that’s way, way less serious than Marvel’s massive summer tentpole. What’s more, it has fantastic actor Jake Gyllenhaal playing the role of Quentin Beck, otherwise known as Mysterio to comic book fans — a character who, though he might seem like a well-meaning good guy at first, is most decidedly not.

While Far From Home‘s Mysterio reveal is one of its biggest setpieces, though, a new interview with screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers suggests that the character almost had more direct ties to what the film did with Nick Fury and Maria Hill. In other words… the MCU almost turned Beck into a Skrull:

“There were some early, early versions of this movie where Mysterio was a Skrull… There were a lot of Skrull versions of the story early on. When you’re doing a con artist movie, what we finally landed on — we sat down and talked about how do we keep on fooling the audience, how do we keep on having a lot of fun reveals How many distractions can we get away with before people want to murder us [The Mysterio skrull reveal] was an early idea about why he was doing everything he was doing.”

McKenna added that he “[didn’t] think it ever made it to paper,” but he, Sommers and director Jon Watts did entertain the idea for some time during the film’s early development process.

Speaking of sneaky ol’ Beck being sneaky, did any of you happen to catch his brief background cameo during the Venice sequence No, I’m not talking about the big action setpiece where Mysterio reveals himself to the world for the first time — I’m talking about a plainclothed hat-and-sunglasses-wearing Jake Gyllenhaal hiding behind Tom Holland’s Peter Parker in one shot.

As reported by CinemaBlend over the weekend, an eagle-eyed Twitter user revealed the sneaky cameo after realizing that Gyllenhaal himself had teased the bit in one of his many entertaining Instagram posts.