It’s been over two decades since Alan Cumming last played the teleporting Marvel mutant Nightcrawler. Now he’s back for Avengers: Doomsday and facing even more formidable foes, like —Mister Fantastic?
“I’m playing Nightcrawler again now. I was learning stunts yesterday for the fight, some fight scene, and I just think, ‘I’m 60 years old!'” Cumming recently told BuzzFeed UK. “Twenty-three years ago I played that superhero, I was kind of old for a superhero even then, and now I’m back doing it. That to me is hilarious, so learning these fights, I’m like, ‘What? Who am I fighting with?’ They said, ‘You’re hitting Pedro Pascal against the head,’ or something.”
Cumming explained that he “can’t quite believe” he’s back in blue in the MCU, “especially because it was such a long time ago.”
“But that is quite a nice thing, I think, about life as you get older,” The Traitors’ Emmy-winning reality TV host reflected, “is that things come back, they always do. And people do. It’s a really nice thing about getting older.”
Other X-Men actors returning include Patrick Stewart, who plays X-Men leader Dr. Charles Xavier; Ian McKellen, who plays Xavier’s former friend turned formidable adversary, Magneto; James Marsden, who plays the laser-eyed Cyclops; and Rebecca Romijn, who plays shapeshifter Mystique. All of these characters appeared in 2003’s X2: X-Men United, the film that marked the only appearance of Cummings’ Nightcrawler (a.k.a. Kurt Wagner).
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Pascal, meanwhile, remains on the rarefied list of Hollywood stars who haven’t appeared in the MCU. Only for a limited time, however, as he’s slated to appear in new MCU film The Fantastic Four: First Steps, releasing July 25, 2025. Avengers: Doomsday, the first new Avengers film since the blockbuster 2019 release of Avengers: Endgame, is set to follow on May 1, 2026.
The Last of Us actor is no stranger to high-budget, high-visibility projects, having the lead role in Star Wars series The Mandalorian and as a major plot-driving character in Game of Thrones. He got his start, however, in guest roles on series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Law & Order.
He told Entertainment Weekly in April that being cast at the head of Marvel’s super-powered new family was “a big ,strange thing that I hadn’t planned on happening. It changed the course of my life in a very sudden way, so I really had to process.”
Marvel Comics/20th Century Fox
Halle Berry as Storm and Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler in ‘X2’
Cumming, meanwhile, is more granular in his appraisal of entering back into the MCU machine.
Discussing the laborious makeup procedure that transforms him into Nightcrawler in April, Cumming enthused, “Actually, what’s great about it — it was four-and-a-half to five hours before, and now it’s 90 minutes… before, all the tattoos were done by hand, because they hadn’t decided on them before we started filming. And now, they’re on these little things and they stick on. It’s a game-changer.”
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