Alan Cumming Reveals Secret Characters in Avengers: Doomsday

Alan Cumming is back in the blue makeup — and he’s got some things to say. The Scottish actor, returning as Nightcrawler in Avengers: Doomsday after more than two decades away from the role, sat down with Deadline this week and dropped a few revelations that Marvel fans are going to be chewing on for a while. Chief among them: the cast list you’ve seen isn’t the full picture.

“Sometimes there were secret names in it because they didn’t want to let out that this certain character was coming back, so they called them somebody else in the script,” Cumming told Deadline. “It was so confusing.”

That’s a tantalizing detail for a film that already has one of the most stacked ensemble casts in superhero movie history. The confirmed lineup alone reads like a greatest-hits collection — Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom, Anthony Mackie as Captain America, Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards, Patrick Stewart as Professor X, Ian McKellen as Magneto, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, and on and on. If Marvel was still hiding characters under fake names in the script, whatever’s coming could be genuinely unexpected.

Cumming painted the whole production as controlled chaos. “This film is like superhero soup,” he said. “There’s so many of them in it. I just can’t keep up. Also, they’re really hard scripts to read — superhero films — because it’s all action and then the names… everyone’s got two names.”

A Much Better Set Than Last Time

For Cumming, returning to Nightcrawler at all required getting past some genuinely bad memories. He originated the role in Bryan Singer’s X2 in 2003 — a film that, behind the scenes, was a rougher experience than most fans knew at the time. He declined to reprise the role for X-Men: The Last Stand, citing the grueling hours-long makeup process, but the set environment was clearly a factor too.

“There were things that happened on the [X2] set that were just shocking to me,” he said. “The working environment was very, very wrong and very just unacceptable. And we all have talked about it in various ways over the years.” Cumming didn’t name Singer directly, but the director’s well-documented on-set behavior during the X-Men era has been a matter of public record for years.

Doomsday, by contrast, sounds like it was a genuine pleasure. “Going back to it after all these years was great because I really liked the character,” Cumming said, adding that he was particularly taken with the Russo brothers. “I really liked the brothers who directed it, and everyone was so nice. And we shot it at Pinewood.”

The production wrapped principal photography in September 2025, but Cumming revealed he still has work left to do. “I’ve actually got to do another bit of filming on it” — a small detail that suggests the Russos are still fine-tuning the film’s massive ensemble even now.

As for how much Nightcrawler fans will actually get to see of him? Cumming was refreshingly honest: “I’m not in it very much, but I really had fun and it was a really lovely thing to go back to.” He added, with evident delight: “It’s kind of great being a superhero at 60. It’s not so bad.”

35 People on Set and a Moment No One Will Forget

Cumming isn’t the only returning X-Men cast member reflecting on the experience. Rebecca Romijn, who plays Mystique in Doomsday, spoke to Collider while promoting Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and described a specific day on set that clearly left a mark.

“That was a very surreal day. I’ll never forget it,” she said of a shoot that brought roughly 35 cast members together at once. “There were two days back-to-back where we were all just kind of looking at each other, going, ‘This is crazy.’ It was very surreal.” For Romijn, returning to a character she hadn’t played in 20 years — and doing it alongside both old X-Men castmates and the new generation of MCU heroes — made the whole thing feel almost unreal. “Very surreal and very exciting,” she said.

According to footage screened at CinemaCon last month (but not yet released publicly), Romijn’s Mystique gets at least one memorable scene — squaring off against Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, apparently shapeshifting into her. It’s exactly the kind of wild cross-franchise collision that makes this movie feel like nothing Marvel has attempted before.

A rumor circulating among fans also suggests that most of the original X-Men didn’t survive the film’s incursion storyline — with Mystique, Nightcrawler, Cyclops, Professor X, Magneto, Beast, Gambit, Wolverine, Deadpool, and one unidentified character among the survivors. Take that with appropriate skepticism, but it does line up with Cumming’s admission that his screen time is limited.

The Russo brothers — back in the MCU for the first time since Avengers: Endgame — are directing from a screenplay by Michael Waldron and Stephen McFeely. A first trailer is reportedly coming before the end of May, or at the latest in mid-June. Avengers: Doomsday opens in theaters December 18.