Being on a show like Severance, you’d think Tramell Tillman would have gotten used to the deadly serious business of guarding spoilers. But apparently even Apple TV’s obsessively studied series can’t compare to the omertà that cloaks projects set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That’s what the Emmy winner discovered when he signed on to play an at-the-time undisclosed role in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
Naturally, that made people even more curious about who he was playing—and how his part might relate to Sadie Sink’s Brand New Day mystery character.
“I’ve received so many questions about my involvement in the movie, and I didn’t tell a soul,” Tillman told GQ in a new interview. “So I was seeing a plethora of theories online and imagery and had people asking me if I was playing this guy or that guy, and it was just so tough to keep a secret.”
And that secret-keeping extended back to the moment Tillman signed on to Destin Daniel Cretton’s feature.
“I got a call from my team asking if I wanted to do a Marvel movie,” he recalled. “That was something that had been on my list for a while. So they set up a meeting with Destin, and I’m pretty sure I had to sign NDAs even before that conversation happened. It was a little frustrating, because everything was shrouded in secrecy. 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.”
We now know, of course, that Tillman plays Bill Metzger, the morally questionable head of the mutant-policing Department of Damage Control. But Cretton couldn’t even tell his potential cast member that much.
“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 said.
Once he accepted the part, Tillman said, “We had a lot of conversations, me, him, and Justin [Kuritzkes], the writer I worked with primarily, about fleshing out this guy and understanding who he’d be in the movie. The description we landed on was that he’s a corporate guy but also a bit of a politician. And that gave me a lot to feed on and break ground on the role.”
The GQ article also notes that after Brand New Day premiered, Tillman went right into filming Severance season three. The spoiler-protecting cycle continues!
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