Shawn Ashmore first played Bobby Drake/Iceman in X-Men, and later reprised the role in the next two instalments. His relationship with Rogue ended up being a key part of the trilogy, and the actor was later given the opportunity to take one last shot at playing the mutant hero in 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past.
By that point, he'd been playing Iceman on and off for a decade and a half, but could he reprise the role now Marvel Studios has seemingly begun to use the Multiverse to bring back familiar faces from the past? During an interview with Screen Rant, Ashmore admitted that he would be interested.
"Yeah, I haven't seen the newest Spider-Man movie, but I know that - I'm trying not to get spoiled - but I know that everybody from everywhere comes. So look, after Days of Future Past, I had kind of accepted that was gonna be our last film, with this group of actors, anyway," he explained. "Disney was taking over the rights. It felt like the end for our characters, the original trilogy cast, it felt kind of like the end of the story. And I've kind of accepted that."
"But obviously, anything's possible, and I have no idea what they're going to do. Are they going to cast completely new actors and start fresh? Are they going to pull actors from the Fox X-Men trilogy into the Marvel Universe? I don't know. If it happened, would I do it? 100%. No question. I grew up playing that character. I'm a comic book fan. It's things that I'm into. So, I would do it again in a second."
Ashmore later added that he's "accepted the fact that I got four movies, and that might be it," acknowledging that he's "pretty happy with that."
Marvel Studios is faced with a significant challenge with the reintroduction of the X-Men moving forward. Do they remind fans of a series of movies that steadily decreased in quality by bringing some of the same actors back for cameos or just start fresh, ignoring the franchise's history? There might be a happy medium there somewhere, but it's going to mean treading a fine line.
Which actor's from the previous X-Men movies do you want to see in the MCU?