Spider-Man: Brand New Day has reached $500 million at the North American box office in record time, and the secrecy surrounding Sadie Sink's character is no more. In her first post-release interview about playing the MCU's Jean Grey, the actress was finally free to discuss her debut as the iconic mutant.
Talking to Variety, Sink admitted that she "knew nothing" about Jean before Marvel Studios' Kevin Feige and Louis D'Esposito offered her the role. However, as soon as she started researching the character, saying yes was a "no-brainer" for the Stranger Things alum.
"She’s such an iconic figure in X-Men and in comics, and I’m very excited to bring my iteration of her to life," Sink said, adding that it was "really important" to give Jean a backstory in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
"She’s very flawed. You’re meeting her at a strange point, because I don’t think she is someone who wants to harm, but she herself has been harmed, so that’s all she knows," Sink explained. "So, giving her that backstory and a motive behind her actions is really powerful. They told me that I was the villain, but that you’re not actually the villain, which is how I played her."
"I don’t really want to lean into, like, this bad guy aura. Because in her brain it’s totally justified. Which I mean, I agree. I think it is."
Sink also opened up on the big V-Max reveal. Throughout Spider-Man: Brand New Day, it's teased as some type of MacGuffin, only for us to learn that, in reality, Jean is unknowingly searching for a faded sticker on a vent that was the last thing Jean's sister, Sara, saw in the Department of Damage Control before dying.
"I remember in the original script there was more dialogue surrounding the realisation that it meant nothing," she recalled. "Jean had lines where she was talking it out loud. Then, on the day, it was kind of like, 'Oh no, I think it just needs to be a look.' It’s gonna be clearer, like you don’t really need to speak it through. I like that that’s the thing that unleashes her, just that anger over all of it being for nothing."
"I think, also, she kind of knew that her sister was gone. She’s been hanging on to this last piece of information, but I think she knows that it’s a long shot that she’s even still around. So, it was just kind of like the final trigger for her or the final confirmation."
"In the early conversations and rehearsals, it was always just really important to [Destin Daniel Cretton] that she’s a young girl in pain," Sink continued. "In finding her voice and figuring out what it would look like, there is this pressure to live up to what a villain in a superhero movie looks like, but our plan was to just go the opposite way."
"To not focus on the evil bits and play into that too much, but rather the really angry, hurt teenager — which I have experience in playing, it seems. [Laughs.]"
Sink later confirmed that she shot every scene where she's talking through another actor, so they could use that as reference for the moments that they're possessed by the psychic. She noted that it was "cool" to see "how people are carrying it or mimicking me in certain ways - Zendaya, especially."
While Jean's actions throughout Spider-Man: Brand New Day are definitely questionable, she's not a full-blown villain, and Peter Parker helps her find redemption.
That happens when the web-slinger allows the mutant to experience a conversation he had with Aunt May shortly after the events of Spider-Man: Homecoming.
"I was so excited to get to that scene just because it feels like every scene before that is her suppressing emotion or hurt, and dealing with it through her powers or through manipulating others. But that’s kind of when the walls come down when she just hears everything that she needs to hear in that moment. Because as strong as she seems and as her actions are, she’s really just so terrified and so alone, and I think resents Peter up until that point for thinking that he’s not alone."
"Like the whole thing with MJ too, it’s like, well, 'You’re holding on to the memory of having people in your life, but they’re gone, and you don’t get to have that.' That’s what the whole MJ manipulation was for: to remind him that like, 'Oh yeah, this is what you can’t have, and this is what this has taken from you.'"
"So, I guess in that final moment, she’s backed into a corner where it’s like, 'Yeah, this person has hurt too,' but what he’s done with his loss and isolation, he’s turned it around and is offering her what he’s learned. And it’s kind of what he needs to hear and remind himself of in that moment, too. So yeah, shooting that was nice, and I had like a good idea of like what needed to be done. I think that was my last day of shooting too, so it just felt like a perfect way to just tie it up and show the core of who she is in that moment."
The first official still of Sink's Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day has also been released. You can check that out below.