What If...? Director Breaks Silence on Mephisto Easter Egg

At no point in time does What If...? reference Mephisto. That's straight from the mouth of series director Bryan Andrews, who recently shut down the fan-favorite idea Marvel's equivalency of the devil appeared in an episode of the animated Disney+ show. The moment in question came during the Dr. Strange Supreme episode after the Sorcerer Supreme (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) absorbed countless amounts of demons.

The camera pulls in tight with the sorcerer's face, and he's quickly seen in a red light donning a look some thought to be that of Mephisto. As Andrews says, however, it's nothing more than a coincidence.

"He absorbs a dragon, he absorbs [these creatures and] temporarily he is that thing, because those things truly are inside of him...," Andrews said in a recent feature on Rotten Tomatoes.

The director added, "And so, he gets their abilities, he gets all of that stuff. And they're just ready at the fingertips. So, we get that hybrid look where he has the horns and looks very devilish. It's so funny how everyone's like, 'He's Mephisto.' It's like, wait, but it was just a dragon!"

Mephisto, of course, has been a fan-favorite theory — or meme, by now — for inclusion in an MCU property since the earliest days of WandaVision, despite series head writer Jac Schaeffer not hearing about the character until the theories began to pop up.

"There was never any conscious intention on my part to create any Mephisto red herrings because I didn't know who Mephisto was until I started doing press," Schaeffer said.

"Why did we talk about the devil so much? That's a real coincidence," Schaeffer said. "He wasn't ever part of our storytelling conversations. We were very clear that the big bad is grief. And then the external bad is Agatha. So as a viewer and as a lover of the show and the characters, I didn't want anything more than that."

The first season of Marvel's What If...? is now streaming on Disney+.

What What If... storylines do you hope to see in the series? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section or by hitting our writer @AdamBarnhardt up on Twitter to chat all things MCU!

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