Look: We know Marvel’s film wing takes its secrecy pretty seriously—especially when it relates to next December’s Avengers: Doomsday, the basket in which the studio has pretty clearly placed all of its delicious, “pulling the ripcord and bringing Downey back to play our bad guy” eggs. Even so, actually filming the movie is starting to sound increasingly surreal, at least as recounted by Alan Cumming, who has described the process of returning to the character of beloved X-Man Nightcrawler after 22 years as being akin to filming in a featureless, co-star-free void.
Cumming was talking to Gold Derby, mostly about The Traitors, and especially about how cute his dog Lala is on The Traitors. (To be fair: Cute fuckin’ dog.) But he did reveal as much as he could about Doomsday, which sounds like almost entirely nothing. “I did the entire film in isolation. Lots of green screen, face replacement. They even gave characters fake names. I don’t know who I was acting with half the time.” Cumming does note that he already got in trouble with Marvel for spoilers at one point—he told Buzzfeed UK that he’d asked who he was supposed to be fighting in a scene, and was told it was Fantastic Four‘s Pedro Pascal—so it’s possible he’s either learned to clam up, or has just been moved off the need-to-know list. (“I broke the internet by mentioning something once, but honestly, I might have got it wrong.”) But it still sounds kind of crazy-making for an actor to be in a scene and not know where they are, who they’re acting “with,” or what other characters are allegedly in the room with them.
(This is not necessarily a new Marvel phenomenon, by the way; Elizabeth Olsen claimed, at least semi-credibly circa Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, that she’d never met John Krasinski, whose Mr. Fantastic her character shared a memorable, if clearly very green-screened, scene with.)
For what it’s worth, Cumming—who suggests that part of the weirdness around his filming had less to do with spoiler control than with his busy Traitors schedule, which necessitated a quick shoot out of sync with the rest of the movie’s cast—has also said he’s just happy to be back in the ol’ blue skin for a second time around. He famously had a pretty bad time filming 2003’s X2: X-Men United, attributing it, in his memoir, to erratic behavior on the part of director Bryan Singer. By contrast, Doomsday was “Actually really… in a sort of ooey, gooey way, it was really healing and really nice to go back to something that was a terrible experience when I did it the first time.”
[via IGN]
