Spider-Man: Brand New Day director Destin Daniel Cretton has revealed that he had to ask Kevin Feige to use the Hulk in the Marvel Phase 6 movie.

Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner has a brief but impactful role in the movie, giving Peter Parker some advice – and later Hulking out thanks to Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey and her mind-control powers.

“Kevin’s not necessarily ever pushing things on us,” Cretton commented on NPR’s Fresh Air podcast, while discussing bringing Jean Grey into the movie. “Once we know what we want, we have to go to him and ask, like, ‘Is that going to work? Can we use this character in our movie?’ The same with Hulk, too. We had to ask Kevin. It made sense to our movie to have the Hulk, it wasn’t a mandate to put him in. We had to request, and Kevin let us do it.”

Brand New Day picks up with Peter Parker in the aftermath of the No Way Home ending, which erased him from the memories of everyone he knows. That means the new film is more of a grounded, emotional tale dealing with Peter’s loneliness.

“When we made Brand New Day, we set out saying, ‘Well, we’ll never make more than No Way Home, never make it bigger than No Way Home. So, let’s just go deeper and make it special,” Feige previously said during a panel at this year’s D23 celebrating 65 years of Spider-Man, attended by GamesRadar+.

“And I have a memory, we were on set of No Way Home, which of course was about Tobey [Maguire] and Andrew [Garfield] and Tom, three Spider-Men together,” he continued. “How do you get bigger than three Spider-Men together? Well, sitting on a golf cart outside the set were Zendaya and Jacob [Batalon] and Tom. And it occurred to me, looking at those three, that that trio is as iconic as the three Spider-Men. And now Brand New Day has proved that.”

Brand New Day is in theaters now. For more, check out our Spider-Man: Brand New Day review, or see our guide on how to watch the Marvel movies in order.