Someone leaked one of the MCU’s best kept secrets, but it wasn’t broken by a hacker, a leaker, or a set photographer with a telephoto lens. It’s almost poetic. It looks like a musician on the red carpet who hadn’t quite tuned back into the conversation undid it.
Steve Lacy went to the premiere of Spider-Man: Brand New Day in Los Angeles on the night of July 27. It was only natural that he would, since his song “oh yeah?” is in the movie. The interviewer made it clear what they were going to ask: “Without giving anything away, which character are you most excited to see?” There was a pause. An important one. A few seconds of Lacy looking somewhere else, at herself, or nowhere in particular. Then: “Jean. I like Jean. “She is the bad guy, but you know she’s crazy for a reason.”
It was only natural for the internet to go crazy.
The way things happened is what makes the moment so funny, and it is funny no matter how you feel about spoiler rules. The clear “no spoilers” language. The long pause. The answer that didn’t seem to match up with what was asked of him. For years, Tom Holland dodged questions about No Way Home with the ease of someone who had trained for it. Steve Lacy didn’t have that kind of training, and it showed. It was kind of cute, actually.
To give you some background, Sadie Sink has been in the film’s press run for months without anyone confirming who she plays. The character was kept secret by the people working on Brand New Day. Sink is said to have made fun of all the rumors instead of addressing them. Fans mostly thought that she was playing Jean Grey from X-Men. Jean Grey is a mutant with complicated powers, and her appearance in a Spider-Man movie would have huge effects on the direction of the MCU. Insiders and leakers had been talking about this idea for a while. Someone on Reddit called it “the biggest secret since Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield.”
While fans may guess the name, there is a difference between someone in the room saying it out loud on camera. That’s what Steve Lacy did. It’s not clear if it was done on purpose or not, and to be honest, it probably wasn’t. It was said that the interviewer looked at them for a moment like someone had just walked into a glass door, which says a lot. In real life, these things do happen. When someone is asking you a question and a camera is on you, the time between what you know and what you should say can go by very quickly.
Technically, it’s possible that none of this is true. Lacy might have had a guess. He might have been making fun of rumors he had heard. He sings in the movie, but that doesn’t mean he’s seen the whole thing or been to a private screening where everything was laid out. There is that caveat. The clip, the pause, and the way the answer was given don’t make it look like the man is lying.
One interesting thing about this is that, compared to its usual bad behavior, Marvel had done pretty well at keeping this secret. It was messier with No Way Home because there was a lot of talk about it, and then it became a cultural event before the movie even came out. Here, it seems like the controlled silence around Sink’s character really did last for a lot of the audience. Then there was a red carpet, a musician who was not paying attention, and a sentence.
Screens will have Spider-Man: Brand New Day on July 31. Whether Jean Grey is waiting inside or not—and it looks more and more like she is—the movie has been getting strong early reactions. It’s been called the best comic book movie in years by critics, which is the kind of praise that makes people want to see it no matter what they know about it beforehand. Steve Lacy may have made people want to buy tickets even more.
