'Guardians Of The Galaxy 2': Did Bradley Cooper Just Spoil Star-Lord's Father Or Is He Just Confused?

One of the mysteries left open-ended in Guardians of the Galaxy is the matter of who Star-Lord's father is. We've gotten hints in interviews over the years, but a seemingly spoiler-y new interview with actor Bradley Cooper (who voices Rocket Raccoon in the films) is going viral today.

In the video interview, the actor appears to either accidentally reveal the identity of Star-Lord's father and the main villain of the upcoming sequel Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, or just get confused about what happened in the original 2014 film. Let's dive into this, and find out what director James Gunn has to say.

Be warned speculation about possible spoilers follows after the jump.

Here is the interview with actor Bradley Cooper, who made the controversial statement while promoting his new film Burnt on MTV International:

Is it possible that Thanos is Star-Lord's father? Well, it's the Marvel Cinematic Universe and anything's possible. But Guardians of the Galaxy and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 writer/director James Gunn took to Twitter to respond to the reports:

So it looks like it was just a matter of Bradley Cooper being confused, and not him accidentally spoiling a big reveal from the sequel.

It's possible that Thanos was revealed to be Star-Lord's father in an early draft of Guardians of the Galaxy. I haven't read any of the early drafts, but we do know that Marvel Studios went through many evolutions of the script during the development of the film, and that the movie we saw was very, very different from the first draft that was handed in.

All that said, Gunn doesn't deny the idea of Thanos possibly being Star-Lord's father. He only debunks the interview by saying that Bradley didn't know who the film's villain was at the time of the interview, and that nothing was revealed. But the idea that Thanos will be pulling the strings in the Guardians sequel is not a huge leap at all. Gunn has discussed what possible role Thanos would play in the sequel before:

He will show up [in the sequel] if he helps our story and he will not show up at all if not. Thanos is not the most important thing in Guardians 2, that's for damn sure. There's the Guardians themselves and other threats the Guardians are going to be facing that are not Thanos.

If Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) also turns out to be Thanos' offspring, that could be a huge twist. In the 2014 film it was revealed that Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) were raised as Thanos' adopted daughters. One thing is for sure, we will find out who Star-Lord's father is in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2.

In the movie, Star-Lord's father is teased in a couple different ways. In the opening, a sick Meredith Quill tells Peter that his father was an angel made entirely of light. After the final battle of the film, the Nova Corps reveals to Peter that they discovered something strange when they scanned him. Quill says, "You mean I'm not Terran?" and Nova Prime responds that his mother is human, but that his father is something incredibly ancient that hasn't been seen before. Gamora thus theorizes that his mysterious biology might be why he was able to hold the Infinity Stone for so long without being destroyed. And a quick scene with Yondu Udonta (Michael Rooker) reveals that he was originally hired to abduct 11-year-old Quill to deliver the boy to his "jerk" father, which he decided against.

So who is Peter Quill's father? In the comic book storyline Quill's father is Prince Jason of Spartoi:

Once there was a man called Prince Jason of Spartoi, and he was wrongly accused of being a traitor by his father. This action caused Jason to run away. When war broke out Jason was asked to come back home. But on the way home Jason's ship converter blew out. He then had to make a crash landing in the Earth's Colorado Mountains. A woman named Meredith Quill helped him out of the ship. She would get him back on his feet and help rebuild his ship. He fell in love with her and conceived a child. In order to return to the war he had to leave Meredith behind so she wouldn't get hurt. Jason locked her memories so that she would be spared the pain he felt. ... When the war against Spartoi and Ariguan had been in Spartoi's favor, Jason asked his uncle Gareth to bring his family to him. But, instead Gareth put a hit on the Quill family. When Peter was eleven he saw men come in and kill his mother. The men left not knowing Peter was there. Peter swore that he would kill those men. Gareth had told Jason that his family had died during birth. Peter with much hope ran away from his orphanage to go to a greater destiny.

Of course, the movie doesn't play out the same way. But screenwriter Nicole Perlman's original draft of Guardians of the Galaxy involved Quill learning his father's identity, and visiting the king on his planet. You can read more about that and even see a bunch of concept art created by Marvel for the abandoned Spartoi sequences, here. However, director James Gunn has gone on record to say that Peter Quill's father will "definitely not" be the character who was his father in the comics.

That's been part of the plan since the beginning, that's something I had to work out before we shot the screenplay. We wanted to make sure Yondu's place in everything made sense and it does, so it's all very specific stuff.

Gunn says that only a few people knew who Star-Lord's father is before he sent out the script: Michael Rooker, Kevin Feige, and Sean Gunn. Gunn has also stated publicly that "at its heart, Guardians is a story about families, and if the first film was about him and his mother, this is a story about fathers." We don't know who Star-Lord's father is, but I'd bet it is a character we've already met in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.