RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 6 sources[Note: This piece contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day .]
The last time we see Sadie Sink’s character in this summer’s already-massive superhero blockbuster Spider-Man: Brand New Day , she’s on a bus. Given a second chance at life by Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, the movie’s supposed villain passes through what might be the foliage of upstate New York, away from the city, and toward parts unknown. Like, literally unknown. Sink genuinely doesn’t know where the hell she’s headed.
That’s per a new interview the Stranger Things performer gave to Variety this week , the first such interview she’s been allowed to do since the movie finally exploded in theaters, allowing her to confirm months of fan speculation that she was playing fan-favorite X-Men character Jean Grey as the movie’s telepathic baddie. Said interview includes the fact that Sink (despite having now worked her way through two big pop culture franchises heavily influenced by them) had no prior knowledge of either the character or the X-Men prior to getting cast, as well as talking through her very early understanding of what the movie’s big “V-MAX” reveal meant. (“Well, at first, I was like, ‘Is the sister in the vent?’”)
But Sink, having come up through her grueling work in the Stranger Things child labor mines, is also an accomplished hand at not saying shit about things she isn’t allowed to say shit about. So when asked whether Jean’s end-of-movie bus trip is headed toward any particular place in upstate New York—say, a particular school for gifted youngsters in Westchester—she presented a possibly genuine front of total ignorance. “Oh, I don’t really know yet, to be honest. And when I say ‘I don’t know,’ I mean I really don’t know,” Sink promised, even as she confirmed that, yeah, obviously, she’s set to appear in Jake Schreier’s forthcoming X-Men movie . (She also won’t confirm how many movies Marvel has her on the contractual hook for.)
Meanwhile, if you’re just curious about what filming Brand New Day was like, Sink noted that it involved a lot of neck contortions, courtesy of the tricky situation her characters winds up in near the movie’s climax. (“I spent a long time in the chair, and my neck, yeah, I was definitely feeling it.”) She also revealed the interesting detail that she and Tom Holland filmed versions of all the scenes where Jean and Peter talk through her various telepathically controlled proxies, which were then passed on to the actors who actually appear in those scenes so they could match Sink’s body language and cadence. “Tom and I did rehearsals, and then we had a full day where we shot every single scene where I’m talking through someone else—we have that on camera, somewhere—as a reference to send to all of the actors who had a line. It was cool; you can kind of see how people are like carrying it or mimicking me in certain ways—Zendaya, especially. I hadn’t seen her scene until I watched it for the first time, and it’s so cool to see that.”
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