Jake Gyllenhaal’s Excitement Over His Mysterio Costume Lent More Reality To Far From Home

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Excitement Over His Mysterio Costume Lent More Reality To Far From Home

By now, you’ve had a good look at Spider-Man: Far From Home’s intriguing take on the marvellous Mysterio, one of Spider-Man’s oldest foes, turned into his new best friend in the movie. The character gets a fabulous spin on his comics gear in the film—and part of the reason it looks so good is down to Jake Gyllenhaal himself.

Mysterio’s iconic look in the comics might be a fan pleaser, but it took the team behind Far From Home a little convincing to bring a fishbowl-wearing VFX wizard (turned maybe actual wizard in the movie) to the big screen. On the set of the film, executive producer Eric Carroll told us it was the work of legendary Marvel Design Team concept artist Ryan Meinerding who helped really bring Mysterio to life.

“[Mysterio] is one of those characters that we’ve wanted to bring to the big screen for a while, and he came up a lot in discussions for the first movie, too,” Carroll said. “It’s a pretty goofy look if you boil it down to its basics. But again, every time that I’m worried there’s no cool version of this, we asked Ryan to spend a couple days thinking about it and he pulls out something like [this design]. And then you’re like, ‘OK, he’s the best concept artist alive.’”

But there’s a difference in between having great concept art and having a tangible, practical suit for an actor to wear, Carroll noted. “We got this great actor, we got this great concept art — can you actually build that armour? Because that’s always the last step. Sometimes, we end up having to not build it and then it becomes a digital thing and well, it’s complicated. But this time around, [costume designer] Anna Sheppard and her team — [supervising art director] Grant [Armstrong], [associate costume designer] Michael Mooney — have done an amazing job.”

A job so amazing that — according to Mooney — Mysterio himself, Jake Gyllenhaal, fell in love with wearing the final suit. “In fact, [Gyllenhaal] wore it more than we expected,” Mooney told us on a tour of the film’s costume department. “You only expect him to wear it for scanning, and then maybe wear it when he’s on lighting reference. But he was wearing it when he was doing stunts — he’s been on wires with it. He’s on wires with it again, next week! It’s been used a lot more, which is always good.”

In fact, Gyllenhaal’s excitement to wear the suit meant that ultimately not only was it kept as a practical costume for much of the film, but the character actually physically wears it in more scenes instead of wandering around in civilian clothes.

“We were just assuming — since we did end up building a fully practical costume — that [Gyllenhaal] wouldn’t want to spend time in it,” Carroll added. “We had said [to him], ‘You can just look cool. You can just look like a cool mercenary man. You can have your t-shirt on, leather jacket and jeans.’ And he was like, ‘Can I be in the costume? I really feel the character, I get it.’ So, not only is this costume practical, but [Mysterio] wears it everywhere it makes sense to wear it.”

You can check out more from our visit to the set of Spider-Man: Far From Home here.


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