The MCU has spent the better part of two years running one of the tightest ships in blockbuster history when it comes to Avengers: Doomsday secrecy. Cast members have been coached, contracts have reportedly included eye-watering NDA clauses, and even small details about the film's central mystery — namely, what Robert Downey Jr. is actually doing back in the MCU — have been guarded like nuclear codes.
Leave it to David Harbour to (maybe) blow it all up in a matter of seconds.
In a recent sit-down with Variety, David — reprising his role as Alexei Shostakov, aka Red Guardian, following his appearances in Black Widow and Thunderbolts — was asked to do something simple on paper: recite a line from Doomsday, completely stripped of context. Deadpan, in his signature thick Russian accent, and pointing directly at the interviewer for effect, Harbour said: "You… are Tony Stark."
The most obvious answer is that this is a real line of dialogue from the much anticipated film, and that somewhere in Doomsday's sprawling, multiverse-colliding plot, Alexei looks Robert Downey Jr.'s character dead in the eye and identifies him as Tony Stark. Given that Stark died saving the universe at the end of Avengers: Endgame, that would be a seismic reveal — and it's already got fan theories working overtime.
Should you actually believe this is a spoiler? Cautiously: probably not, but nobody's ruling it out either. Marvel Studios has not confirmed or denied that the line is real, and there's been no scramble to walk it back the way there was earlier this year when a different MCU cast member's comments got a hasty studio ‘clarification’.
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