Spider-Man: Far From Home Writers Originally Wanted To Do Something Very Different With Mysterio

Contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Far From Home

Jake Gyllenhaal's Mysterio was originally meant to be doubly duplicitous in Spider-Man: Far From Home.

During a chat with Collider's Adam Chitwood, Far From Home screenwriter Erik Sommers shared that there was an early draft of the Spidey sequel's script in which the illusion expert and master manipulator Mysterio is revealed to be a Skrull, a member of the shape-shifting race of aliens first seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Captain Marvel. 

"There were some early, early versions of this movie where Mysterio was a Skrull," said Sommers, who co-wrote Spider-Man: Far From Home with Chris McKenna. "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?"

Pulling the curtain back and subverting expectations by revealing that – surprise! – Mysterio isn't a superhero but is a green-skinned alien who can take on the form of basically anyone it sees was "an early idea about why he was doing everything he was doing," according to Sommers. 

McKenna also shared that the notion didn't advance into later stages of script development, dying off fairly quickly and very early on. However, that Mysterio-is-a-Skrull shocker idea wound up informing the twists that made it into Spider-Man: Far From Home – those being that Mysterio was lying about being from a different dimension, masquerading as a good guy in order to take advantage of Peter Parker (Tom Holland), covering up the fact that he was a disgruntled former employee of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) at Stark Industries, and using illusion tech he and his team developed to create fake monsters known as Elementals in hopes that the public would appoint him as the new Iron Man. Additionally, the Skrull twist helped Sommers and McKenna formulate that jaw-dropping post-credits scene that shows two other people had been a Skrulls throughout the entirety of Far From Home: Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders). 

"I don't think it ever made it to paper, necessarily, but we talked about it for a while. But we talked about a lot of stuff. We spent a lot of time in a windowless room with [director] Jon [Watts], and the folks from Marvel and Pascal Pictures, just talking it through. That's what it is, in those early stages. It's just a lot of talk. Going down different roads and just gradually refining things until you have a story," McKenna said. 

With the way Spider-Man: Far From Home ended (Mysterio seemingly dying, Peter Parker's identity being revealed, and doctored footage of Spider-Man ordering the attack on London being played on a huge monitor in New York City), there's bound to be even bigger twists in the potential third entry into the Spider-Man franchise. Mysterio may or may not physically appear in the film, but the consequences of his tricks will certainly have a ripple effect — as will those of actual Skrulls Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) and Soren (Sharon Blynn) pretending to be human. Fingers crossed that everyone will be exactly who they say they are the next time Spider-Man swings into theaters.