Avengers: Doomsday - Alan Cumming On What it Takes To Project Spoilers
· BCPosted in: Marvel Studios, Movies | Tagged: avengers: doomsday
Avengers: Doomsday – Alan Cumming On What it Takes To Project Spoilers
Alan Cumming has explained how Marvel didn't want to reveal certain characters were returning, so they would call them something else while filming Avengers: Doomsday.
Published Sat, 09 May 2026 17:02:09 -0500
by Kaitlyn Booth
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Article Summary
- Alan Cumming says Avengers: Doomsday used fake character names in scripts to protect major Marvel spoilers on set.
- Cumming also revisited the difficult X2 work environment, calling parts of that experience shocking and unacceptable.
- Despite the secrecy and confusion, Alan Cumming previously described returning for Avengers: Doomsday as healing.
- Avengers: Doomsday marks Marvel’s high-profile return to the Russo Brothers and opens in theaters December 2026.
The first run of X-Men movies was essential because they laid the foundation for everything we are experiencing now, including the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. However, as time has gone on, we've learned that things behind the scenes weren't exactly sunshine and rainbows. Alan Cumming was more upfront about his dislike of the experience, but at the time, he was mostly referring to the extremely long process of putting on the Nightcrawler makeup. It sounds like there was a lot more going on behind the scenes, and while he didn't get into details when he recently spoke to Deadline, he did reveal how "very, very wrong and very just unacceptable" that work environment was.
"There were things that happened on the [X2] set that were just shocking to me," Cumming says. "The working environment was very, very wrong and very just unacceptable. And we all have talked about it in various ways over the years… Going back to it after all these years was great because I really liked the character, and so to go back and play him now, and also this film is like superhero soup. There's so many of them in it. I just can't keep up."
Avengers: Doomsday is bringing back the first generation of X-Men characters, hopefully for a final swan song, because we really need to let this go and move on, and it was a little surprising that Cumming was among them. The thing he cited as the reason he wasn't returning, or one of them, was the makeup process, and Paul Bettany, Zoe Saldana, and Karen Gillan are just a few Marvel actors who could tell you the studio still uses makeup when possible.
This time, it might have been the way Marvel was shooting Avengers: Doomsday that could have put a damper on the experience for Cumming. He describes times when, "there were secret names in it because they didn't want to let out this certain character was coming back, so they called them somebody else in the script. It was so confusing." However, Cumming has said in previous interviews that, even with all these measures and how confusing some of them might have been, it was also "healing" for him.
Is Avengers: Doomsday Taking Steps Back Instead Of Forward?
Over the summer of 2024, word came that Marvel and Disney were courting Anthony and Joe Russo to return and direct the next two Avengers films. It made sense in a way; they were coming off a year that didn't exactly go to plan, and no doubt they wanted to go with what they thought would be the safest option. It turned out that the reports were spot on, and in July 2024, they were announced as the directors at San Diego Comic-Con. That was also where we learned that Robert Downey Jr. would be coming back as Doctor Doom, and it became very clear that Marvel was playing it safe by returning to what worked the first time.
At the end of March 2025, over the course of five and a half hours, Marvel announced a large portion of the Avengers: Doomsday cast, which includes, along with already confirmed Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Vanessa Kirby, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Letitia Wright, Paul Rudd, Wyatt Russell, Tenoch Huerta Mejía, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Simu Liu, Florence Pugh, Kelsey Grammer, Lewis Pullman, Danny Ramirez, Joseph Quinn, David Harbour, Winston Duke, Hannah John-Kamen, Tom Hiddleston, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Alan Cumming, Rebecca Romijn, James Marsden, Channing Tatum, and Pedro Pascal. The inclusion of previous X-Men characters is more proof that Marvel is taking steps back instead of forward. The stream was also an announcement that the film had entered production. Avengers: Doomsday will be released in theaters on December 18, 2026. Avengers: Secret Wars is set to be released on December 17, 2027.
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