Everyone thinks the new Doctor Strange trailer’s disembodied voice is X-Men’s Patrick Stewart

The newest trailer for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is here, and while Stephen Strange is in all sorts of trouble, it’s a mysterious voice that has the internet’s attention. Around the 1:18 mark in the trailer, an offscreen voice addresses Strange, and fans seem pretty convinced that it’s Patrick Stewart. This could be either a surprise addition to the cast or even the arrival of Fox’s X-Men characters to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The voice appears when Strange is standing in handcuffs. It seems to come from someone who’s only partially on camera — we can see the person’s ear and a maybe-bald head, which is honestly good enough for us to get excited. The British-accented voice says “we should tell him the truth,” which doesn’t reveal much on its own.

Revealing the X-Men in Multiverse of Madness may seem far-fetched, but it’s certainly not impossible. We know the movie has undergone significant reshoots under director Sam Raimi, and speculation pointed to these shoots adding new characters to the film. What’s more, after the completion of Disney’s 20th Century Fox acquisition, the X-Men license is under its control, so its cast of mutants both past and present are free to appear whenever Disney chooses.

Of course, the other nearly $2 billion elephant in the room is Spider-Man: No Way Home, which proved that Disney and the Marvel Cinematic Universe are more than capable of pulling in characters from defunct franchises. The latest Spider-Man movie also opened up the fiction of the MCU to all kinds of other world and characters — including Venom. With all of No Way Home’s success, it seems entirely possible Disney would be eager to pull in a few cast members from the X-Men series, particularly someone like Stewart who has been around since the first movie in 2000.

The X-Men’s last cinematic adventure came in 2019 with X-Men: Dark Phoenix. Thankfully for Disney, that movie bombed tremendously, so not many people will be clamoring to a follow-up to the storyline. Meanwhile, the X-Men series that has been going on for almost two decades now is no stranger to time travel and alternate universes, so jumping into the MCU thanks to Doctor Strange would fit right in.

This wouldn’t even be the first time Fox’s X-Men universe has crossed over into the MCU ... sort of. The Fox version of Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters instead of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, also showed up in WandaVision, but was only an illusion created by Agatha Harkness. This at least opened the door to the franchises crossing over, but didn’t commit to anything as big as having Charles Xavier put Doctor Strange on trial.

While all of these arguments are pretty compelling, they’re also based on one very British-sounding line and the left ear of ... someone? This mysterious cameo could certainly signal the arrival of Sir Patrick Stewart’s Professor Xavier and some of his gifted youngsters, or it could just mean that some lucky actor sounds a whole lot like Professor X and has a role in Doctor Strange’s new adventure.