David Harbour has blown Tony Stark’s cover in Avengers: Doomsday. It might just be what Marvel needs

Nobody 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.

Collective wish fulfilment … Cillian Murphy. Photograph: Mark Sagliocco/Bafta/Rex/Shutterstock

The irony is that Harbour’s line sounds plausible because Marvel has spent the past two years – ever since Downey Jr was unveiled beneath Doom’s mask at San Diego Comic-Con – slyly hinting that if you watch the next two Avengers films, you may just find out what the hell is going on. Now it has to actually make good on that promise, even though this is a universe in which umpteen superheroes (and enough filmgoers to rack up the best part of $3bn at the global box office) watched Stark save all existence by snapping his fingers and expiring in front of them in Avengers: Endgame.

Perhaps Harbour’s line is genuine, and it is only our interpretation of it that is wrong. Red Guardian is hardly the MCU’s leading authority on interdimensional metaphysics: confronted by a man with Stark’s face, “You are Tony Stark” would be a perfectly reasonable thing for Alexei to say even if the answer is simply: “No, actually, I’m Victor von Doom.” This would allow Marvel to acknowledge the elephant in the room without turning its new villain into Iron Man gone bad, and still leave Downey Jr free to be exactly who the studio keeps insisting he is.

Either way, the genuinely strange possibility now seems to be that Downey Jr’s return really does have absolutely nothing to do with Tony Stark. And yet, you do not bring back the actor who spent 11 years as the face of the MCU, put another metal mask over that same face and then expect audiences to regard the resemblance as an administrative coincidence. Harbour may have leaked the biggest secret in Doomsday, or he may simply have made up the most obvious line imaginable for a laugh.