Jon Watts Weighs in on Spider-Man: Far From Home’s Mid-Credits Surprise (SPOILER)

Warning: Spoilers follow for Spider-Man: Far From Home.

Director Jon Watts discussed the big surprise appearance in the mid-credits scene of Spider-Man: Far From Home. In the scene, Peter Parker and MJ have taken a webswing-enabled ride around Manhattan now that she knows his identity, only to see a broadcast from about The Daily Bugle (an extreme news website in the MCU) in which J. Jonah Jameson airs footage doctored by Mysterio to make people think Spider-Man killed him, then outs Peter as the webslinger. The role was played by J.K. Simmons, who of course played the role in Sam Raimi’s trilogy.

Highlights from Watts’ discussion of the appearance with Uproxx are below:

On casting Simmons to play Jonah again: “Yeah, there was never a question. I was like it has to be him or let’s not do it.”

On Simmons’ reaction to being offered the role again: ”I think he was initially just a little weirded out by the request. He was like,‘Wait, what? What do you mean?’ But then I got to properly pitch it to him and it totally made sense to him. I think it must have been a little bit surreal for him to just step back into this role after such a long time. But it was incredible.”

On screwing up Simmons’ first take of the scene: “I ruined the first take because just he launched right into it and it was so amazing that I couldn’t stop laughing. It was so great … No [he wasn’t annoyed], I think he was glad that it was still working.”

On the Daily Bugle being more of an Infowars-style news source: “Yeah, I think he’s definitely sort of on the fringes of the news media.”