Spider-Man: Far From Home Director Details Mysterio and Elemental Villains

On the heels of squaring off with the Vulture in New York City and Thanos in space, Spider-Man will now have to deal with Elemental creatures and a comic-villain-turned-friend in Mysterio during his Spider-Man: Far From Home outing. While visiting the set of Spider-Man: Far From Home in London last year, ComicBook.com heard about Jake Gyllenhaal‘s role in the film, which is being billed as an ally — for now.

“Mysterio enters the comic as a hero,” Far From Home director Jon Watts explains. “So, I always took it right back to the source material and what made that character exciting initially.” Of course, Mysterio does take a villain turn as much of his powers and lure are built on illusion and lies.

“But in terms of how we ended up with Mysterio in the first place, I wanted to put a character on screen that we hadn’t seen before,” Watts said. While this may limit the options in some minds, seeing as the Green Goblin, Sandman, Electro, and many others have been seen before, Watts looks forward to exploring uncharted cinematic territory with the wallcrawler’s villains. “But of the big, iconic villains, Mysterio was the one who jumped to the top,” Watts explains. “Because of who he is, what he may-or-may-not be able to do, it’s really opened up a lot of possibilities for the kind of story we can tell with him. So, it was pretty clear Mysterio would make a good addition for the universe.”

With Mysterio serving as a friend instead of a foe, the Elemental creatures which represent big screen versions of Hydro-Man, Molten Man, and others become the movie’s main threat. “Well, because Mysterio is playing hero in this story, we needed real antagonists that could put Peter in danger,” Watts said. “And for me, I wanted to really raise the action stakes from the last movie. With the Vulture it’s a one-on-one fight. A mechanized villain. But with Spider-Man, you have the ability to do so much more. We’ve seen him fight much larger villains and have spectacular set pieces– and I felt like the way to do that would be to bring in — I mean, you say B-level heroes, but I’ve always loved Hydro-Man and Molten Man and his ability to have a giant, elemental kind of creature for Spider-Man to fight against. Anything that makes things more difficult for him and opens up visual opportunities for me, I’ll run at bat.”

On the creative side, Mysterio’s costume (which has now been revealed in full in trailers) was inspired by the designs of Iron Man’s suit along with the Vision and Thor’s capes. Mysterio is a big fan of such heroes, so it’s possible he sees their absence as an opportunity to fill their void himself.

While the details of the film were largely kept under wraps, especially considering the set visit was several months prior to the release of Avengers: Endgame, Tom Holland did admit he is having a great time fighting bad guys with Jake Gyllenhaal as Mysterio.

“He’s awesome, man,” Holland said. “Jake and I got on really well, and it’s interesting because when you hear the word Mysterio as a Spider-Man fan, you immediately think villain and that’s not the case in our film. He’s a new addition to this world of heroes, he’s my teammate throughout the movie. It’s funny because Jake is such a great guy and we get on really well. It’s been fun fighting these crazy monsters with him.”

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Spider-Man: Far From Home hits theaters on July 2.