Sacha Baron Cohen Is Joining The Marvel Universe As The Most Powerful Villain?
Noted Marvel leaker Jeff Sneider revealed that Sacha Baron Cohen is joining the MCU as Mephisto in a Disney+ special.
Sacha Baron Cohen is one of the most gifted performers we have ever seen, and we’re always happy to see him pop up in a new project (one that preferably won’t make us spend many long, long years hearing annoying people say, “my wife” in their worst Borat voice). And since he is such a gifted performer, many felt it was only a matter of time before he joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Industry guru Jeff Sneider revealed on his Hot Mic podcast that Cohen wouldn’t just be joining the MCU, but is playing Mephisto (Marvel’s closest thing to the devil).
This lines up with previous rumors claiming that Sacha Baron Cohen would be playing Mephisto. Those earlier rumors claimed that Cohen would be playing Mephisto in the upcoming Disney+ series Ironheart. And while that could still be the case, Sneider’s hot gossip points to Cohen starring in a different Marvel Cinematic Universe project entirely.
According to Sneider, Sacha Baron Cohen was recently shooting a Marvel Studios Special Presentation concerning Mephisto. Previous special presentations included both The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special and Werewolf by Night and the latter’s supernatural focus may hint at the Mephisto special’s tone. Disney also seems to be very confident in Cohen being a big draw for audiences, seemingly elevating him from having a minor role in someone else’s television show to having a special devoted solely to his character.
The bigger question is what role Sacha Baron Cohen’s Mephisto would have in the growing Marvel Cinematic Universe. In Marvel Comics, the character often makes “deal with the devil” arrangements with various heroes and villains. The most famous (or perhaps infamous) example of this is the “One More Day” Spider-Man story, where Spider-Man convinces Mephisto to save Aunt May from a recent bullet that was meant for the hero, but the price the devil demands is that Spider-Man agrees to an alteration of reality that makes it so that he and Mary Jane were never married.
As written, that was meant to be a classic story where a hero must make an impossible choice: to give up marriage to the woman he loves to save the life of the woman who raised him. At the time, though, most fans rightfully saw this as a way of undoing previous comic events (like Spider-Man unmasking in front of the world during the Civil War issues…Mephisto erased everyone’s memories of this moment) while also hitting a kind of reset button (literally erasing the marriage of Peter Parker and Mary Jane made the comic more accessible to fans of the recent Spider-Man 3, a movie where the characters were not married). We can’t help but wonder if Sacha Baron Cohen’s Mephisto is going to do something similar and undo some major previous event in the MCU.
Ultimately, it’s impossible to tell what Sacha Baron Cohen’s Mephisto will end up doing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It may be in line with what we’ve seen in the comics, but it may be something completely different from what we expected (and Cohen is certainly the master of delivering the unexpected). Maybe the audience will get a chance to make our own deal with the devil…honestly, we’d give him almost anything if he could alter reality so that we never spent money on Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
