Once again, MCU fans are caught up in a Mephisto rumor—and this one has Sacha Baron Cohen

Now that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has given us a Spider-Man movie with all of the different Spider-Mans in it and Charlie Cox’s Daredevil has fully jumped (and flipped, and grappling hooked) over from Netflix, it’s time for rumor-loving MCU fans to return to the bread-and-butter of their diet: Mephisto. Marvel’s lord of Hell who is basically Satan but is not literally Satan. The guy who, in the comics, erased Spider-Man’s marriage, served as Thanos’ hype man during the Infinity Gauntlet story, and (more recently) transformed the Marvel universe into a thinly veiled parody of the DC Universe—which, coming from a guy who is effectively Satan, was a very funny gag.

Marvel fans were convinced that Mephisto was working behind the scenes of WandaVision, but he didn’t, leading them to suspect that he’d appear in Loki. He didn’t, and he also didn’t appear in Moon Knight. But he’s gotta show up at some point, if only so comics readers can turn to their friends and say “he’s basically Satan but not literally Satan,” and now we have a hot new Mephisto rumor for everyone to dig their pitchforks and cloven hooves into, with some people claiming that he’ll show up in the upcoming Ironheart series and be played by Sacha Baron Cohen.

Now, this is a completely unsubstantiated rumor at this point, and it does seem like an overly complex way to set up some kind of “mah wiiife” joke about Spider-Man and Mary Jane (“What did Peter Parker say when he found out Sacha Baron Cohen was playing Mephisto?”). However, the reason we’re looking at this one a little closer and stroking our pointy devilish chinbeards is that Deadline just wrote about the pervasiveness of this rumor and how we definitely don’t have any concrete information about whether or not it’s true. Shady Twitter pages with names like “MCUZone” or “Steve’s Comix Reviews” can print rumors like that all they want, and they do it constantly to feed desperate MCU fans, but if Deadline is saying “hey, people are talking about this,” it does seem like… something that people are talking about.

Deadline doesn’t have any real details, but it does say that “a source close to the production” has confirmed that “there has been talk on the [Ironheart] set” about Sacha Baron Cohen being part of the show. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it might. Either way, Ironheart definitely stars Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams (who will make her debut in Wakanda Forever), plus Anthony Ramos, Manny Montana, Shakira Barrera, Alden Ehrenreich, Regan Aliyah, Shea Couleé, and Zoe Terakes.