The Eternals: Everything you need to know about who – or what – they are

Sprite

One of the youngest Eternals – if you call 3,000 years old being “young,” – Sprite (Lia McHugh) your archetypal, good-natured prankster. In fact, if there was story involving some kind of cherub looking trickster, it was probably Sprite. Among the other aliases Sprite has gone by have included Puck from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and also Peter Pan.

Also, for whatever reason, she’s perpetually stuck in the body of an prepubescent girl. Though, at first, she originally started life looking like an prepubescent boy in the comics. That is until a recent storyline resulted in him, along with the other Eternals, being killed and reincarnated into new bodies. It’s just so happened Sprite came back as a girl (the better to coincide with an upcoming movie).

Anyway, like Sersi, Sprite can rearrange matter, though not as good as her cousin. In addition, she also has a knack for creating illusions, the better to fool her opponents, and, much to their annoyance, her fellow Eternals. This also means that Sprite, despite not actually being a child, certainly acts like one. Not that she doesn’t want to “grow up.” Back when she still looked like a boy, Sprite attempted to do just that by using his cosmic energy to tap into the Dreaming Celestial. Unfortunately, this also ended up in giving all the Eternals collective amnesia.

Gilgamesh

Known as “the Forgotten One,” Gilgamesh (Don Lee) was one the first Eternals to fully awake to his powers during the First Host. Also, Gilgamesh isn’t the only name he’s had over the centuries. He’s also gone by Samson and Hercules, and yes, the deeds of those heroes are attributed to him – even though there’s also a Samson and a Hercules in the comics who are also supposed to be those heroes, too.

In any case, it was because Gilgamesh became so involved in doing heroic deeds for humans that Zuras essentially imprisoned him in an isolated portion of the Eternals’ city of Olympia. It wasn’t until centuries later that Sprite ended up setting him free when invading Deviants attempted to take advantage of the chaos of the Fourth Host. Thus Gilgamesh and Sprite have been a sort of Batman and Robin style dynamic duo ever since.

Kinjo Sunen

Although Kinjo (Kumail Nanjiani) has the same powers as his fellow Eternals, he chooses not to use them. Instead, he opts to fight with a sword. Aside from warding off a second Mongul invasion of Europe, he spent most of his life in Japan where he became a Samurai. In the present day, he used that experience to land several leading roles in Samurai and martial arts movies, becoming an famous international movie star.

That’s in the original comics. For the upcoming movie, instead of being a world famous movie star from Japan, he’s a world famous Bollywood actor from India. And, according to his apparent official character description, he’s capable of shooting “cosmic energy projectiles from his hands.” Which, considering all the Eternals are capable of this, makes things rather vauge.