While Tramell Tillman is best known for playing Seth Milchick in the hit Apple TV subscription-exclusive series Severance, 2025 marked his first time appearing in a blockbuster movie, as he played Captain Jack Bledsoe in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. Next, he’s joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe through the 2026 movie releaseSpider-Man: Brand New Day. While Tillman’s role officially remains undisclosed, a rumor has surfaced about who he’s playing in the upcoming Marvel movie, and it sounds like it will have implications for the wider MCU beyond this latest adventure with Tom Holland’s Peter Parker.
The United States Department of Damage Control (DODC) was introduced to the MCU in Spider-Man: Homecoming as the government agency put together to clean up after conflicts involving enhanced individuals, starting with the Battle of New York in 2012. However, following Tony Stark’s death in Avengers: Endgame, the DODC has taken on a more antagonistic role by outright policing enhanced individuals, as seen in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and the forthcoming Wonder Man, which premieres to Disney+ subscription holders on January 27. If The Cosmic Circus is to be believed, Tramell Tillman is playing the new head of DODC.
According to the outlet, Tillman’s unnamed character will be leading the investigation “to apprehend a new rogue metahuman they have been keeping an eye on for a while” in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. This metahuman is Sadie Sink’s mystery character, who is allegedly under the protection of Jon Bernthal’s Punisher. That will put him in Damage Control’s crosshairs, too, along with Spidey and Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk.
But it goes even further than that, as it’s also mentioned that Tillman is expected to reprise his DODC role in future Marvel projects, specifically “taking on a more prominent role in the next saga of the MCU: The Mutant Saga.” You see, following Avengers: Secret Wars, Damage Control will supposedly evolve into a new agency that will “apprehend any superhuman seen to be using their powers without any legal authority or oversight,” meaning everyone except the Avengers. As many of you reading have likely already deduced, this new agency will be an especially big threat to the X-Men and larger mutant community.
The goal is to invoke fear of powered individuals into the general public, allowing this agency to capture such individuals, experiment on them and develop weapons to “neutralize the mutant threat.” This is definitely out of the X-Men lore’s playbook, and Cosmic Circus wraps up by mentioning how Marvel Studios intends to use villains like Bolivar Trask, Mr. Sinister and the Sentinels for the “mutant-centric” projects coming up. That makes me wonder if Tramell Tillman is secretly playing one of these characters, though perhaps he’d go by an alias in Spider-Man: Brand New Day so his true identity could be revealed in something X-Men-related.
Take all this information with a grain of salt right now, and don’t even try to trick Tramell Tillman into admitting he’s playing a villain, because it won’t work. Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens in theaters on July 31, so while we obviously won’t know the full extent of Tillman’s involvement until then, hopefully one of the trailers can tip us off to whether or not there’s any legitimacy to thus rumor.
