Red Guardian – perhaps not an authority on interdimensional metaphysics? Photograph: Marvel View image in fullscreen Red Guardian – perhaps not an authority on interdimensional metaphysics? Photograph: Marvel Week in geek Film David Harbour has blown Tony Stark’s cover in Avengers: Doomsday. It might just be what Marvel needs Ben Child The actor, who plays Red Guardian in the film, made a cryptic comment to Variety that raised more Robert Downey Jr-shaped questions than answers. But was it a clanger, or expert trolling?
N obody knows exactly what solemn blood oaths Marvel uses to prevent spoilers. But we do know that Andrew Garfield spent most of the run-up to 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home – in which he would eventually turn up as one of two secret Spideys – behaving as if Kevin Feige was standing behind him, holding up a giant card saying: YOU HAVE NEVER MET TOBEY MAGUIRE . So we can imagine it’s pretty full on. Why, then, has Avengers: Doomsday star David Harbour this week apparently blurted out the biggest Marvel secret since Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin in Iron Man 3?
Invited by Variety magazine to offer up a line from Doomsday “completely out of context”, Harbour thought for a moment, adopted the Russian accent of his Red Guardian character and came out with : “You … are Tony Stark.” Which is quite a thing to say about a film whose entire marketing campaign so far has depended on us accepting that Iron Man remains dead, and that the actor who used to play him, Robert Downey Jr, is playing Victor von Doom instead.
So what’s going on? The simplest and most likely explanation is that Harbour is trolling us, that Stark is not in the movie at all, and we’re all just fools. The new trailer for Doomsday, premiered last weekend at Disney’s D23 event in Anaheim, leans heavily into the prevailing wisdom that the film’s villain will be the tyrannical, unstoppable baddie of spurious eastern European extraction that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby dreamed up in 1962.
We even get to hear more of Doom’s heavily accented voice, and there is no suggestion that it belongs to anyone but Downey Jr beneath the mask. The footage talks repeatedly about “Victor”, hints at the supervillain’s tragic history and seems determined to establish him as a fully fledged character in his own right. If Marvel is planning a rug-pull here, it is certainly doing an impressively thorough job.
Not that this has stopped anyone. Some fans have already noticed that one closeup of the masked villain in the new footage appears to show a pair of blue eyes, rather than Downey Jr’s brown ones. Others noticed that the costume Marvel displayed at D23, on mannequins, was subtly different from the version shown at San Diego Comic-Con in July. From this slender collection of ocular and tailoring evidence has emerged the theory that there may actually be two incarnations of the character: Downey Jr’s version, perhaps initially presented as an ally; and a nastier variant who eventually replaces or kills him.
Naturally, because Cillian Murphy has blue eyes and has spent years being fancast as Victor von Doom, the internet has decided that the second man behind the mask must therefore be Cillian Murphy. If it’s correct, this may be the first big Hollywood casting decision achieved entirely through collective wishful thinking – at least since Marvel rewarded years of online fancasting by briefly turning John Krasinski into a variant Reed Richards in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.…