[Warning: This article contains spoilers for Ironheart episode 6, “The Past Is the Past.”] Speak of the devil and he doth appear. There has been much talk of Mephisto in the MCU, with the oft-rumored Marvel villain widely speculated to be the big bad behind Disney+ series WandaVision and Agatha All Along — which name-dropped the Lord of Lies — because of his history with witches Wanda Maximoff and Agatha Harkness in the comics. There Marvel’s Faustian supervillain bedeviled Silver Surfer, tormented the Scarlet Witch, damned multiple Ghost Riders, put Spider-Man through hell, and made deals with everyone from Doctor Doom’s mother to pre-Green Goblin Norman Osborn. But it wasn’t until Tuesday’s three-episode Ironheart season finale that Mephisto (Sacha Baron Cohen) finally appeared.
“The Past is the Past” saw Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) forge a magic-powered suit of armor to steal the demonic cloak that gave Parker Robbins, a.k.a. Hood (Anthony Ramos), powers like the ability to turn invisible and bend bullets to his will. Consulting the magical mother-daughter duo of Madeline Stanton (Cree Summer), a Kamar-Taj-trained Master of the Mystic Arts and her “witchling” Zelma (Regan Aliyah), Riri was warned she was dealing with “one of the most powerful beings in the universe.”
Zelma suspected the source of the Hood’s dark magic was the entity called Dormammu — Cosmic Conqueror and Destroyer of Worlds who dwells in the Dark Dimension in the 2016 Doctor Strange movie — only to learn that Robbins bargained with Mephisto when he appeared before Riri in a pizza parlor. After fighting magic with magic — and doing so without the N.A.T.A.L.I.E. AI (a holographic manifestation of Riri’s dead best friend, Lyric Ross’ Nat) — Riri made a deal with the devil when she accepted Mephisto’s offer to bring Natalie back from the dead.
In a cliffhanger ending, we saw Nat and Ri reunited, with Riri’s arms covered in black veins — the same symptom of Mephisto’s corrupting influence over the Hood, who had become a black-eyed, fang-toothed demon by the time he battled Ironheart 2.0.
“I just absolutely love that we’re not meeting him in WandaVision or Agatha,” Ironheart executive producer Ryan Coogler told Variety about bringing Mephisto into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “You’re meeting him through this stressed-out, young Black genius. When you watch the show, it’s like, ‘Oh, that was how you always were gonna meet him.’ It wasn’t gonna be in Loki. That’s the trickster; that’s how he works. That’s where he’s gonna be: in a pizza shop in Chicago, like, where you would absolutely never expect him.”
Indeed, fans have been expecting Mephisto as far back as 2021, when WandaVision star Paul Bettany acknowledged fan theories that Mephisto was behind magically-made twins Billy and Tommy Maximoff (as he was in the comics). Bettany’s comments even sparked speculation that the actor cast as Mephisto might be Al Pacino, who played Satan in the 1997 film The Devil’s Advocate.
When Sasheer Zamata’s potions witch Jennifer Kale said the words “agent of Mephisto” in Agatha All Along, some took it as a sign that Mephisto would be waiting at the end of the Witches’ Road. (Aubrey Plaza’s “Green Witch,” a.k.a. Death, ended up being the twist character.) Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that, in the comics, Kale is a descendant of the 17th-Century Ghost Rider Noble Kale who — like daredevil Johnny Blaze — was empowered by Mephisto.
“I hope this doesn’t upset anyone, but Mephisto has never interested me,” WandaVision and Agatha All Along showrunner Jac Schaeffer revealed last year, dispelling rumors that Mephisto was planned as the villain all along. “We have an early, early document that included him in a potential antagonist, but I don’t remember ever really taking that seriously.”
Schaeffer continued, “And also, within the MCU, logistically, it wasn’t right for our show. I will say, it was not my intention to toy with anyone with the Mephisto stuff… I think I just continue to underestimate the appetite for Mephisto among the fan base.”
It also came out last year that Ryan Reynolds and director Shawn Levy, the co-writers of Deadpool & Wolverine, “flirted with” the idea of Mephisto as the main villain of the first R-rated Marvel Studios movie. The filmmakers “went through a lot of ‘almost’ versions of this story” before landing on Emma Corrin’s Cassandra Nova as the villain, Levy said. Concept art also revealed plans for a Nic Cage cameo from 2007’s Ghost Rider, where Easy Rider icon Peter Fonda portrayed Mephistopheles.
When word of Cohen’s casting in Ironheart leaked in 2022, rumors swirled that he was, in fact, playing Mephisto. The series spinning out of 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever wrapped filming later that year, but underwent a round of additional photography in 2024; the six-episode first season of Ironheart premiered in June 2025. Official copyright filings later leaked online and described the Borat actor’s character as “Mystery Man.”
Following Tuesday’s finale, Ironheart series creator and head writer Chinaka Hodge told Variety that tying Mephisto into the Hood’s origin story — rather than Dormammu, as is the case in the comics — was a “collaborative” process.
“I could tell the story about process, and you would know how benevolent Kevin Feige is,” Hodge said of the series executive producer and president of Marvel Studios. “But I will say that it was a collaborative effort, where we all landed on Mephisto together, but there was one of us in the room who led us there, and I’m eternally grateful for him leading us that direction.”
Executive producer Zoie Nagelhout revealed that Mephisto wasn’t the “initial idea,” and that Doctor Strange villain Dormmamu was originally considered to be behind the Hood’s rise to power.
“If you look to publishing, Parker’s power is drawn back to Dormammu, who is also a very epic character in the MCU and who would have been very exciting to play with,” she said. “But as we developed it, we realized Mephisto was a better thematic fit for what the show is about. Diving into these scenes of ambition and cost and what you’re willing to give up for the things you want, he offered a sort of interesting and heightened way to tie together the characters’ journeys — and in particular, Riri’s — so it became almost like a no-brainer to have him.”
Episode director Angela Barnes pitched Cohen as Mephisto and “we couldn’t unsee it,” Nagelhout added. “And we’re just so lucky he said, ‘Yes,’ because at that point, I don’t think we could’ve gotten out of our heads that he was Mephisto.”
All six episodes of Marvel’s Ironheart are now streaming on Disney+.
The post The MCU Just Confirmed One of Its Biggest Castings After Years of Rumors appeared first on ComicBook.com.
