Jake Gyllenhaal suspiciously avoids revealing if Mysterio is a villain

Jake Gyllenhaal appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and vaguely answered if Mysterio was a villain or not. We’re pretty sure we know why.

If you end up watching a lot of interviews with Marvel celebrities like I do, you start to notice a pattern when the interviewers ask them some spoiler-territory questions. Some of the MCU veterans have become adept at expertly answering those questions without revealing too much. But MCU newcomer Jake Gyllenhaal still has a lot to learn.

Even though it’s 100 percent confirmed that Jake Gyllenhaal will be Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home after seeing the trailer, there are still more questions to be asked. Mainly, people want to know why Mysterio comes off as a hero in the trailer. In the brief moment he appears in the trailer, Mysterio heroically arrives on the scene while disaster strikes as if he’s a bona fide Avenger. He warns, “You don’t want any part of this,” to someone before battling what looks like a version of Hydro-Man.

Despite Mysterio’s heroic actions in the trailer, the character is notoriously known for being a comic book villain. Thankfully, when the actor appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday, the host tried to confirm what we’d all been expecting.

“And Mysterio, he’s a villain?” Colbert asked him. And that’s when Gyllenhall tried to play it as cool as possible, responding with a, “Well…”

Colbert then clarified his question by saying “I mean, in the comic books, he’s a villain.” Which to that, Gyllenhaal coolly nodded his head and put on his best poker face. That’s when Colbert dropped the subject and moved on, but we’re sure Colbert got exactly what he needed. (You can see the short exchange between the two the clip below, around the 3:40 mark.)

Just like the scene in the first Avengers where Black Widow finds out Loki’s plan with minimal questioning, so have we with Gyllenhaal’s interview. As rumors have been circulating so far, word is that Mysterio is pretty much a poser in Far From Home. The Elementals that appear in the trailer (the Sandman, Molten Man and Hydro-Man lookalikes) have likely all been conjured up by Mysterio. And Gyllenhaal’s wishy-washy answer seems to confirm that Mysterio’s not as heroic as he seems.

We don’t know for sure why Mysterio may be creating these monsters to battle himself. But it’s giving us some serious Incredibles vibes where (14-year-old spoiler alert) Syndrome plans to wreaks havoc in the city, all as a master plan to make him look more heroic. This could certainly be the case for Far From Home, where Mysterio wants to make himself look like a hero despite being a zero.

Why he’d prefer to create his own disaster versus just fighting any other disaster is beyond me, though. At this rate, becoming an Avenger is about as easy as getting a library card, since there are disasters pretty much everywhere. If Mysterio wanted to be a hero, literally all he had to do was ask. But I digress. There’s probably something more emotionally jarring to his backstory, just how Syndrome’s master plan in Incredibles stemmed from his rejection by Mr. Incredible as a child.

We’re not saying Spider-Man: Far From Home will completely rip off the Incredibles, but the similarities are certainly giving us pause. While Gyllenhaal likely has a lot of interviews to go, we probably won’t find out Mysterio’s real intentions until we see the movie on July 5.