Producer definitively answers whether Luke Cage is in 'Agents of SHIELD'

After Sunday's trailer for Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, people stopped asking about Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg), and turned their attention to the mysterious, super-powered character played by J. August Richards. The speculation has been that he was actually Luke Cage, while some speculated he could be the New Warrior known as Rage. We just received a definitive answer to one of those theories, while the door is opened to many more.

IGN caught up with producer Jeffrey Bell, and hen asked about Richards he had this to say....

Bell: "He’s so good, because we were looking for this character M-- I almost said his name. It’s not the one people are talking about."

When pressed further and asked specifically about Luke Cage, Bell was definitive in his response.

Bell: "I’m going to say that’s an interesting Marvel character, but no. But he came in and killed it. Honestly, we were looking for this part, and we just said, look, all our parts are open to all diversity. So the fact that we have a black dude who is awesome and it's J, was just because he was the best actor. It wasn’t like, “You know who…!” 

But is the character at least a Marvel character? Or is he someone completely new? Bell does a bit of tap-dancing around that answer....

Bell:   "You know, not necessarily. I mean, we’re going to draw from it, but Marvel has its thing, and we’re also going to be expanding forward, and this world is different since The Avengers. So I think there will be people showing up, some from the Marvel Universe and some not. But to commit to anything more would be telling."

That's a perfectly solid non-answer Bell just gave, which leads me to suspect that Richards is playing someone familiar to the Marvel Universe.  There's the suggestion from IGN's transcript that Bell made an 'M' sound in almost giving away the character's name, but that's far too subjective to be taken seriously.  So marking Luke Cage off the list, who else could it be? There are a lot of options, believe it or not, many of which I'll be addressing very soon.