No Stark Tech Available: “Brand New Day” Costume Designer Sanja Milkovic Hays on Making Spider-Man Homemade Again

Costume Designer Sanja Milkovic Hays is no stranger to Marvel or the Spiderverse. Hays has outfitted Marvel misfits in Thunderbolts*, the O.G. Avenger in Captain Marvel, and not one but three iterations of Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Yet for director Destin Daniel Cretton’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Hays had a new and trickier challenge than it might sound on first blush: taking things back to basics.

Already the year’s biggest box office hit, this fourth entry in the Tom Holland-led franchise picks up four years after the mind-wiping events of 2021’s No Way Home. In that film, Peter messed up Doctor Strange’s original spell, ripping open the multiverse and unleashing villains from alternate universes, as well as two additional versions of Spider-Man (played by former webslingers Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire). To fix that mess and keep the people he loved safe, Peter had Strange wipe everyone’s memory of his existence. That included his girlfriend, MJ (Zendaya), and best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), who still have no recollection of his secret identity at the outset of Brand New Day. 

Peter is still slinging webs and fighting crime—in fact, he’s done a bang-up job keeping New York safe and has made a new friend, of sorts, in Detective Jean DeWolff (The Bear‘s Liza Colón-Zayas). But Peter’s burnt out, lonely, and something strange is happening to him on a cellular level. On top of that, a dangerous telepathic threat is wreaking havoc in New York. Spider-Man: Brand New Day also stars Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle/The Punisher, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/the Hulk, and Stranger Things star Sadie Sink.

Here, Hays takes us behind the seams of going back to basics but making more suits than ever, why Tom Holland wanted to be part of the process, and how her team in the UK found perfection in imperfection. 

What were the first conversations you had about the Spidey suit for this film and this version of Spider-Man?

Peter is on his own; there is no Stark Industries anymore, so the conversations were about how he gets the new suit. He has to make it himself without nanobots and whatever Stark Industries was helping him with. The whole story is human and personal, so director Destin Daniel Cretton wanted the suit to look simpler and homemade. There was always talk about not using CGI in post-production to iron out the wrinkles and so on. They really wanted to make him much more believable and approachable and for the suit to be more like in the comics. Tom got involved in the conversation very early on. I’m not sure who initiated that, and I was not privy to it, but he had seen Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire’s suits, and he wanted to include the best aspects of those. Tom was going to wear the suit 80 percent of the time in this film, and he has never been in the suit this much before.

This suit reminded me of the old TV show from the 1970s. In certain sequences you can really see the low-fi elements, and it’s as if the perfection is in the imperfection.

That’s a very good way of describing it. It was so simple that it had to be perfect, but imperfections had to be deliberate, not accidental. The previous suits had a lot of details so that stuff could be hidden in there. There was no hiding on this suit. Every line, every detail, everything had to be absolutely perfect. We used over 250 meters of fabric just testing it to find the right red and blue that would look good on the digital cameras under different lights. We also wanted to have that sheen that was on the suit in the previous movie, but that fabric does not exist, so we were testing different prints to achieve that metallic look but also creating something comfortable and easy to use.

It also needs to be practical and stunt-ready.

It goes without saying that the suit needs to be stunt-ready. Even though Tom does a lot of his own stunts, and probably does more stunts than a lot of other actors, he had a few different stunt doubles because we were shooting in a few different places. As a result, we had to have a suit for each of them, and they were ripping and so on, so we actually made about 56 suits. 

When you were creating the fabric, did you do that with the UK costume teams?

The base fabric was bought in the US, but the color was not right, so we tried to dye it. It looked fine to the naked eye, but when you put it on the digital camera, it was reading more pinkish. Then we used fabric that was an orange-red, and adjusted the red color. We went through the same process with the blue, so we tried dyeing a more turquoise color, and through the camera lens it was the color we wanted. We then printed the fabric. I had a phenomenal team in the UK. They were printing yards and yards of fabric. They were not printing the web design but a clear print to give the fabric an otherworldly sheen.

Is there a company you go to for that kind of specific artistry?

It was all done in-house. We had a phenomenal team of about four or five people. The only thing that was not done in-house was the boots. They were made in Toronto by a man called Jeff Churchill. He has been making boots for me for 20 years, but everything else was made in-house in London. I had a phenomenal, hardworking, talented crew, and they were all freelance artists.

A big part of Sadie Sink’s character’s identity is her hood, which acts like a protective cloak in some ways. How did you come up with the right look and feel?

It was all custom-made. We knew we wanted to use mostly green and yellow. The consensus was we didn’t want her in a superhero costume because of the story. She’s just this person on the street, so she needed to look believable, like a regular girl but cool. There is that introduction shot when she has a hood, and we didn’t want to know whether it’s a man or a woman, so the hood had to cover her entire face.

What tweaks did you make to the Punisher, and why did you make those creative choices?

The Punisher’s vest was made by a guy who manufactures real military vests. It’s not a real vest, but it looks just like one, and then we just painted it. It was made to his size, but it needed to look like the genuine item he took off a shelf somewhere, and that was a big change. It wasn’t a costume in a sense.

What about Scorpion? 

That is the one costume that FBFX made in London, a company that does specialty costumes. They have very special machines to do that kind of thing, but the tail was CGI. We made the whole costume, the beginning of the tail on his back, and the end of the tail as a prop for that one scene when he comes up to Spider-Man’s face. The rest was designed and produced to fit Michael Mando and make it as comfortable for him as possible, so he and his stunt double could move. Michael was fantastic. He was very excited and willing to do, you know, whatever we asked. It was a lot of work to make it because we had to scan him and make it exactly right for his body, which is more like the standard superhero costume process.

Audiences seem to be a lot more engaged in the crafts of filmmaking than they were. How do you feel about that?

Especially with Spider-Man, everybody wants to know how things are made. I get messages on Instagram all the time, but there was one hilarious message the other day. It said, “What jeans did Tom Holland wear in the scene at the university, and what are his measurements?” I was like, “You have got to be kidding me! You really think that I’m going to tell you Tom Holland’s measurements?” Anyway, I think it’s great that people want to know what we do. I’m especially thrilled that they want to know about Spider-Man because I had an almost unfortunate thing happen after the last Spider-Man, where even my colleagues were like, “Oh, this is all CGI. You didn’t do anything, right?” I’m like, “I made 35 suits. It’s not CGI.”

Actors like to wear the costume because that makes them feel like a character. Tom was adamant at the beginning to show everybody that it’s him in the costume, that he’s wearing it, that it’s a real costume, it’s not CGI, and that’s why when we were shooting in Glasgow, he came to the set and took the mask off in front of everybody. He said, “Listen. It’s me in the costume,” and you could see in the two scenes in the movie that it is him. There is no muscle suit. It is Tom Holland all the way. I think it shows appreciation for what we do. There are a lot of people working really hard. Everything has to be perfect. You make a little mistake. That’s it. You have to throw it away and start all over again, so I’m thrilled that people are noticing.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in theaters now.