Warning: This article contains spoilers for “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”
For months, audiences speculated over who Sadie Sink was playing in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” a secret Sink avoided revealing at all costs.
Spoiler alert: She’s playing Jean Grey.
While that casting will hardly come as a surprise to the hyper-online Marvel fans (and is hardly treated as a reveal in the movie itself), those audiences might be a bit more surprised to learn about Jean’s sister, Sara.
So who is Sara Grey, and what do the comics tell us about this character? Read on to find out.
Who is Sara Grey in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”?
In “Brand New Day,” Olivia Booth-Ford plays Sara Grey, the sister of Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey. Like Jean, Sara is shown to be a telepath, one whose powers seemingly manifested before or around the same time as Jean’s.
In the beginning, Sara has a better handle on telepathy than Jean does, teaching her how to circumvent their powers’ 33-foot radius by “hopping” from one person’s mind to the next.
When Jean and Sara (abandoned by their mother after the manifestation of their powers) are at the park playing with their telepathy, they are beset by a series of Department of Damage Control agents, who take Sara into their custody. Sara uses her powers to get Jean to safety, with Jean spending the rest of the movie trying to get her back.
In the third act, Jean learns that Damage Control (led by Tramell Tillman’s Bill Metzger) inadvertently killed Sara while experimenting on her to learn more about her powers. Jean’s powers then far surpass Sara’s, placing her more in line with her comic book counterpart (an Omega-level telepath with telekinesis).
Who is Sara Grey in the comics?
In the comics, Sara Grey has a far different story than in the MCU.
The character was created by Chris Claremont and John Byrne as part of Claremont’s foundational “X-Men” run in 1980s “X-Men #136” (a key issue in the iconic “Dark Phoenix Saga”).
In the comics, Jean and Sara were not abandoned by their parents, nor did Sara have telepathy. Instead, Jean’s parents agreed to send her away to be trained by Charles Xavier, while Sara remained home. Claremont wrote a story in 1981’s “Bizarre Adventures #27” (with art by John Buscema and Klaus Janson) in which Sara, after Jean’s death, recalls a time in which she worried that she and her children were also mutants after learning about her sister’s powers.
Claremont initially imagined Sara as having her own mutant powers, which would manifest as she joined the original X-Factor team. In the end, Jean would be the one on that team, which consisted of her fellow founding X-Men (Angel, Beast, Cyclops, Iceman) after she returned from the dead.
Sara and her husband, Paul Bailey, went missing in “X-Factor #12,” written by Louise Simonson with art by Marc Silvestri and Bob Wiacek, after Jean discovered they were prominent mutant rights activists. They later died in 1994’s “X-Men #36,” written by Fabian Nicieza with art by Andy Kubert and Matt Ryan, at the hands of mutant hunter Steven Lang.
Does Sara ever get powers in the comics?
Upon Sara’s Death, Steven Lang implied that she had some sort of low-level mental powers, giving her enough fortitude to temporarily resist the anti-mutant technology known as the Phalanx.
These were not the powers Claremont initially envisioned for Sara. Instead, his original idea was that Sara would have the ability to activate the latent powers in mutants whose mutations had not yet appeared.
Sara was resurrected in the 2024-2025 “Phoenix” series written by Stephanie Phillips with art by Roi Mercado. There, she appeared with the powers Claremont originally intended for her to have.
“That’s my latent mutant ability,” Sara says in “Phoenix #11.” “I can unlock someone’s full potential.”
In the end, it was revealed that Jean actually unintentionally constructed this resurrected Sara through the power of the Phoenix Force — so she’s not the exact same Sara Grey as before, but she does share her memories. It’s a pretty complicated family tree.
Welcome to the X-Men.
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