If a franchise is around long enough, then the greater the chances are you’ll have an actor return to play a different character. Just look at all the actors the Law & Order shows have reused over the years. However, every now and then there’s an opportunity to have the characters played by such an actorconnect to one another or even become the same character. Now it’s been confirmed that the latter is the case with Martin Starr in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Martin Starr first cameoed as a college student in The Incredible Hulk, credited simply as “Computer Nerd,” who Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner gives pizza to in order to access the Culver University computer lab. Nine years later, Starr returned to the MCU as Roger Harrington, a science teacher and head of the Academic Decathlon Team at Peter Parker’s school in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
During a recent Reddit AMA, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige was asked if we can assume if Martin Starr’s The Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man: Homecoming characters are the same people. Feige responded:
I do.
There you have it. If the head honcho at Marvel Studios consider Martin Starr to be playing the same individual in the MCU, then we can take that as a fact. When he briefly crossed paths with Bruce Banner, Roger Harrington was still going through higher education, but eventually he found a teaching position at the Midtown School of Science and Technology, where his life would intersect with another superhero.
It’s worth noting that in The Incredible Hulk novelization, Martin Starr’s character is named Amadeus Cho, who in the Marvel comics universe is a young Asian American man who is one of the smartest people on the planet and succeeded Bruce Banner as The Hulk in recent years. Obviously that portion of the novelization has been rendered non-canon, paving the way for a more faithful version of Amadeus to be introduced down the line. After all, we already met Amadeus’ mother, Helen, in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
While Roger Harrington’s participation in The Incredible Hulk was simply reacting with gratitude that Bruce Banner gave him pizza (there was a scene where he had dialogue, but it was cut), he had a more substantial role looking after his students in Spider-Man: Homecoming. He was on the elevator in the Washington Monument with some of the teens when the Chitauri energy core detonated, but fortunately Spider-Man saved him and the others before they fell to their deaths.
Martin Starr is reprising Roger Harrington this summer for Spider-Man: Far From Home, as Roger is one of the teachers chaperoning the trip to Europe. So naturally he’ll get caught up in Spider-Man’s latest adventure, but it remains to be seen if he’ll ever interact with Bruce Banner again. That would be quite a reunion, especially considering how Bruce is looking nowadays.
Spider-Man: Far From Home spins its web in theaters on July 2. For everything coming to the MCU afterwards, look through our handy guide.
