Sadie Sink’s Role In ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Explained

SPOILER ALERT: This post heavily spoils Sadie Sink’s role in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

The cat, or should we say mutant, is officially out of the bag.

Stranger Things actress Sadie Sink has taken on the role of Jean Grey in the fourth solo Spider-Man installment film, providing a villain of sorts to Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, at least for most of the film. She is not the first actress to embody the powerful telepath, as Sophie Turner most recently portrayed her in X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019) when Jean Grey bonds with a force that corrupts her powers while strengthening them. Turner also played the younger version of Grey in X-Men: Apocalypse (2016).

Famke Janssen played a grownup version of the mutant in 20th Century Fox’s original trilogy of films — X-Men (2000), X2 (2003) and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). She also returned in cameo moments in The Wolverine (2013) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014).

Sink’s Jean Elaine Grey doesn’t appear until later in the film, and even then, it takes Peter a bit to officially name her, but her powers are clear – she can invade people’s minds and jump between bodies as long as the distance remains 33 feet or under. Thus, she can manipulate people to do her bidding, and watching her feed them words from beneath her hood is chilling.

In the comics, Jean is closely tied to a cosmic entity known as the Phoenix, and her psychic powers manifested after the traumatic moment she witnessed her best friend’s death. She found Professor Charles Xavier, a fellow telepath and mutant expert, who mentored her and guided her through her development as a psychic.

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Grey watched her closest friend, Annie Richardson, get struck by a car while they were playing, and the moment caused her to prematurely develop her telepathic powers, inadvertently creating an empathic link to her dying friend and thus experiencing Annie’s death herself.

In Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Jean is in search of what Peter first thinks is some sort of weapon locked in a vault in the Department of Damage Control in Manhattan. Tramell Tillman’s Damage Control Director Bill Metzger let Peter believe this too, until the third act of the film flips the story on its head and exposes what — or who — Jean is really after. She is searching for her sister Sara, who was captured one day when they were honing their shared psionic abilities in the park.

Sara raised Jean and helped her grow into an even more powerful telepath. In the fourth Spider-Man film, Metzger took Sara to help him develop a machine that would map her brainwaves and replicate her abilities for anyone to use. Tragically, the effort killed Sara, and all she left behind in the eerie childhood bedroom that doubled as a test chamber was her tricolor green, yellow and blue scrunchie. Metzger tried to use the machine on Jean to continue mapping out the regions of the brain that correspond with her abilities, but Peter Parker interfered and performed the ultimate sacrifice by taking Frank Castle’s (Jon Bernthal) long-range bullet to save her from dying. She, in turn, accessed his brain while he healed in the hospital to help him recover.

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The end credits didn’t explicitly state that Jean Grey would return like they did with Spider-Man, but this introduction marks the launch of another X-Men character and storyline, which Marvel has been inching towards since Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) and Disney’s 2019 acquisition of 20th Century Fox, which possessed all the X-Men and mutant properties.

As viewers see in the end of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, there is a reason Jean is considered the most powerful mutant in the Marvel comics, demonstrated by her ability to freeze the population of Manhattan within no small distance of a radius. She is an omega-level telepath, and if some are seeing similarties to her and Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), they aren’t too far off. Jean’s powers of manipulating matter, warping reality and creating or destroying entire universes sound a lot like Wanda’s chaos magic, which she has used in the past to build entire worlds and mask her grief by generating her dead and lost family.

Ryan Reynolds even teased Jean Gray’s appearance with the pantone color of his gray suit in which he appeared at Comic-Con unbeknownst to fans. Gray Deadpool is known for leading the X-Force, for which he holds auditions, and Jean Grey eventually becomes a member of a variation of that team in the comics.