The first Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer premiered earlier today, finally giving us our first taste of the upcoming Marvel movie’s plot. Among the many goodies in the preview was a snippet of Severance’s Tramell Tillman playing a character who’s seen telling Spidey that, “We are facing a danger we can’t control. One we can’t even see.” While Tillman’s character hasn’t been fully identified yet, there’s already speculation that the trailer confirmed he’s someone from the X-Men’s corner of the Marvel universe.
This stems from the fact that the mystery man Tramell Tillman is playing in Spider-Man: Brand New Day is identified in the trailer’s captions as Bill. It might not seem like much at first, but hat tip to ComicBookMovie for remembering a recent rumor claiming that the actor’s character is an obscure X-Men villain named William Metzger. This antagonist has only ever appeared in the comic book limited series X-Men: Children of the Atom as an anti-mutant crusader, and allegedly Tillman’s version of him will also have an axe to grind with mutants in the MCU.
That’s a lot to glean from the first name Bill, so take all this with a grain of salt for now. That said, Tramell Tillman playing William Metzger would also line up with another Spider-Man: Brand New Day rumor from December. It was alleged back then that Tillman’s character is the new head of the Department of Damage Control, and that he’s leading an investigation to “apprehend a new rogue metahuman they have been keeping an eye on for a while.” That would be Sadie Sink’s mystery character, who’s supposedly under the protection of Jon Bernthal’s Punisher.
If Tramell Tillman’s Bill is indeed William Metzger, or at the very least not a fan of mutants, then that would lend credence to the repeated claims that Sink is playing Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The December rumor also claimed that Tillman will reprise his character in other MCU projects, and will specifically be “taking on a more prominent role in the next saga of the MCU: The Mutant Saga” as Damage Control starts apprehending any superhuman using their powers without “legal authority or oversight.” The agency’s endgame, per the rumor, is to experiment on these superhumans and develop weapons to “neutralize the mutant threat.”
Again, this is a lot to draw from just one caption in the Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer, so hopefully the next trailer will provide more insight as to whether this information is legit or not. But if this Bill is so anti-mutant as has been claimed, then while Tom Holland’s Peter Parker may be cordial with him now, I can’t see them getting along once he learns of the man’s true intentions. It also means that whenever the MCU’s X-Men reboot gets off the ground, it’s a good bet we’ll see Tramell Tillman pop up in it.
Whether or not Tramell Tillman’s Bill is secretly a bad guy or not, Spider-Man: Brand New Day isn’t lacking in adversaries for Peter to battle. Michael Mando and Marvin Jones III are starring as The Scorpion and Tombstone, respectively, and the trailer confirmed we’ll also see Boomerang, Tarantula and The Hand. Brand New Day arrives to the 2026 movies schedule on July 31.
