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Tramell Tillman is going to play a big role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s future. And he can finally talk about it.
Tillman, who won an Emmy last year for his supporting role in Apple TV’s “Severance,” had been
hoping to appear in a Marvel movie for some time, and heard from his team that Destin Daniel Cretton, the director of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” wanted to meet with him. But the meeting came with a catch: “I’m pretty sure I had to sign NDAs even before that conversation happened,” he tells GQ in a new interview.
The actor found the mystery around his role — Bill Metzger, a comic-book character who opposes the X-Men and, in the MCU, will be a government official helping to mitigate the damage superheroes cause — to be challenging: “It was a little frustrating, because everything was shrouded in secrecy,” he tells GQ. “So I wasn’t even sure specifically how the character would fit into the world of the movie, and I’m pretty sure they had to play their cards very close to the chest because they weren’t sure if I was going to accept it.
Along with Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey, Metzger is a crossover from the “X-Men” stories into “Spider-Man”; Marvel brass didn’t want the fact of these two worlds colliding onscreen to leak. But it presented a conundrum for an actor who didn’t know what part he might be signing up for. “So we’re kind of playing this back-and-forth game where I’m asking Destin, ‘Well, what can you tell me?,’” Tillman recalls. “And Destin would say, ‘It’s this and that, but I can’t say anything more than that.’ But he told me it was a pivotal role, and that’s about it. So this was a leap of faith. Do I want to jump at this opportunity or do I want to hold off and wait for another potential opportunity from Marvel?”
Tillman decided to take the leap, and crafted a character he compares to Barack Obama: “I had this inkling that Metzger had just a little bit of swag, a little smoothness,” he says. “There’s a fullness, a calmness, a steadiness there.” And now that “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” has become the second-fastest film to reach $1 billion in total box office gross, Tillman can likely expect to reprise the role — this time knowing what he’s signed up for.
