The Avengers: Doomsday cast is widely expected to grow between now and its December release date, because of the sheer number of weirdly missing characters. Several – like Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel, Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau, and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange – seem inevitable, and there are a lot of rumors that point to some more surprising inclusions. The great hope for MCU fans is that not all of the big secrets are spilled before the movie’s release, but it seems unlikely. Now, at least we’ve got some insight into the measures Marvel and the Russos have taken to hide some of those secrets.
Original X-Men trilogy star Alan Cumming has revealed that the Avengers: Doomsday cast that we know isn’t complete, and the upcoming sequel has secret characters who were even disguised in the script. Cumming spoke to Deadline and revealed the detail while talking about his return as Nightcrawler for the tentpole MCU release:
“This film is like superhero soup. 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… and 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. It was so confusing.”
Alan Cumming Reveals How Much Nightcrawler is in Doomsday
Image Courtesy of Fox
Cumming also reflected on his experience working on Bryan Singer’s X2, which was infamously beset by set issues and a cast protest against the director’s behavior. He says, “the working environment was very, very wrong and very just unacceptable” but that Doomsday felt like a cyclical experience – and a far more positive one, thanks in part to the Russos, as well as revealing he’s got some additional scenes to shoot, despite the producton wrapping principle photography in September 2025: “I really liked the brothers who directed it, and everyone was so nice. And we shot it at Pinewood… and I’ve actually got to do another bit of filming on it.”
Intriguingly – and a little disappointingly – Cumming also revealed how much he’s in Doomsday, and it’s not good news for fans: “I’m not in it very much, but I really had fun, and it was a really lovely thing to go back to… It was lovely to go back to something I never thought I’d go back to and have a lovely time doing it. And also, it’s kind of great being a superhero at 60. It’s not so bad.” Does that mean the original X-Men’s timeline isn’t going to last long? Or perhaps that only some of the returning X-Men cast will be making the jump across to another universe? At this point, the former seems the most likely, but it would be a shame if they were all killed off before the chance to return in Avengers: Secret Wars. It’s just hard to look beyond the idea of the Russos using some of the big names to sell how much of a threat Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom is…
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