Alan Cumming has revealed that he has now finished filming his scenes as Nightcrawler for Avengers: Doomsday, and it sounds like the Scottish actor had a much better time shooting the Marvel Studios movie than he did on X-Men 2.
Cumming made his one and only appearance in 20th Century Fox's X-Men franchise as Kurt Wagner, aka Nightcrawler, in X2, but declined the studio's offer to reprise the role for the third film because he had no interest in sitting through the lengthy makeup process again.
Cumming has previously spoken about how arduous he found the experience, and has now reiterated that, although he liked the movie itself, he had a "miserable" time shooting X-Men 2 during a new interview with People.com.
"I just came back. It was amazing. It was actually really... in a sort of ooey, gooey way, it was really healing and really nice to go back to something that it was a terrible experience when I did it the first time. A great film, great film. I love the film."
"It was actually really great to go back," he added. "And especially, I'm 60 years old. I did not think I would be doing stunts, playing a superhero in my 60s. So that was great. And everyone was really nice. And I got it done really quickly because I couldn't go, because of The Traitors, when most of my scenes were being shot."
"So I squashed them all together, and got a green screen and various things and little scenes of people here and there," Cumming went on. "But it was pretty stealthy."
Cumming recently took to social media to share some behind-the-scenes photos teasing his transformation into the teleporting mutant.
Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars were recently hit with significant delays, with Doomsday now set to arrive in theaters on December 18, 2026, and Secret Wars positioned for December 17, 2027.
Both movies will be directed by the Russo brothers, who also make their MCU return after helming Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.
"Being able to create stories and explore characters within the Marvel Universe fulfilled a life-long dream of ours, and we discovered a powerful connection with audiences in each film that we made. We’re thrilled to collaborate once again with Kevin, Lou and the entire Marvel team to bring this epic adventure in storytelling to new and surprising places for both the fans and ourselves”, said The Russos in a statement after the SDCC panel.
You can check out the full (for now) Doomsday cast list below.
• Paul Rudd as Ant-Man
• Simu Liu as Shang-Chi
• Tom Hiddleston as Loki
• Lewis Pullman as Sentry
• Florence Pugh as Yelena
• Danny Ramirez as Falcon
• Ian McKellen as Magneto
• Sebastian Stan as Bucky
• Winston Duke as M’Baku
• Chris Hemsworth as Thor
• Kelsey Grammer as Beast
• James Marsden as Cyclops
• Channing Tatum as Gambit
• Wyatt Russell as U.S. Agent
• Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm
• Rebecca Romijn as Mystique
• Patrick Stewart as Professor X
• Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler
• Letitia Wright as Black Panther
• Tenoch Huerta Mejia as Namor
• Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards
• Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost
• Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm
• David Harbour as Red Guardian
• Robert Downey Jr as Doctor Doom
• Ebon Moss-Bachrach as The Thing
• Anthony Mackie as Captain America