Guardians of the Galaxy 3’s Phlektik Reveals a Big Secret About the Marvel Movie

This Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 article contains spoilers.

One of the biggest thrills in a new James Gunn movie is seeing how he uses his stock company of players. Since his earliest days in the business, Gunn has loved bringing back actors from his other projects, making his brother Sean cameo as Calendar Man in The Suicide Squad, getting Nathan Fillion from his first feature Slither to play Simon Williams aka Wonder Man in unused artwork for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and even sneaking Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman into a big budget Disney movie for the first and third Guardians films.

But while Guardians Vol. 3 finally saw Fillion get a bigger part, and the move also brought back Old 97’s frontman Rhett Miller from the Christmas Special for a couple of shots, the most unlikely cameo involved a relative newcomer to the cast of Gunn players.

Pete Davidson first worked with Gunn in The Suicide Squad, portraying two-faced (and then no-faced) Booster Gold villain Blackguard. And it’s now been revealed that Davidson also played a part in Guardians 3, but you’d never know unless Gunn himself pointed it out.

In response to a Twitter fan question about Gunn voicing a character in the movie, the director deflected attention toward his pal Davidson: “My friend Pete not only voiced but actually came to visit us in Atlanta for a day and played Phlektik on set,” he tweeted.

Oh, you don’t recall seeing Phlektik? And you, deep-dive Marvel reader and constant rewatcher of MCU movies, have no idea who Phlektik is? Well, don’t be so hard on yourself. Phlektik is one of the High Evolutonary‘s guards who tries to arrest Star-Lord and Groot in the movie’s third act. Not only does Phlektik have no comics counterpart as far as we can tell, but Davidson was utterly unrecognizable as the bug-eyed alien.

Equally baffling is the reveal of the character that Gunn played: “I voiced the beautiful Lambshank,” he tweeted. “I don’t want to show her here because she’s too gorgeous and I don’t want folks to feel bad about themselves in comparison.” When another user pressed him for more information, Gunn offered this coy explanation: “Mantis screams because she sees something behind her.”

Mantis does a lot of screaming in the film, but in this case, she’s screaming because she’s startled by the experiment she’s trying to save from the High Evolutionary’s cells. While leading the children out to Knowhere, Mantis turns to see a mutated pile of gloop waddling behind her with a friendly smile on its face. That goop is Lambshank, who thanks Mantis before heading off to join the others.

We know that Guardians 3 is Gunn’s last movie before committing full-time to DC Studios, where he is now the co-head. He’s already hinted that he’ll be bringing some of his Guardians crew with him, raising questions about who will pop up in his next project, Superman: Legacy. Will we get Michael Rooker as a Southern-fried Pa Kent? Will Gunn cast Pete Davidson as jerky Daily Planet sportswriter Steve Lombard? Will Sean play Beppo the Super-Monkey?