Shawn Levy Says Ben Affleck Was One of 70 Marvel Characters on a Early List They Wanted in DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE

There were a lot of incredibly fun cameos in Deadpool & Wolverine, but there were also a lot of rumors about cameos before the movie was released that never showed up. That doesn’t mean some of those characters weren’t on a list at one point.

Some of those early rumors included Ben Affleck, Halle Berry, James Marsden, and several others. During a recent interview with Variety, director Shawn Levy was asked if Affleck was one of the actors ever in talks to join since he was name-checked in the film.

He went on to reveal that Affleck was one of 70 actors on an early list for the film. He said: “Early on, when we were looking at a 70-name menu of Marvel characters, Daredevil was on one of those lists, but never since those earliest of conversations, and never to the point of outreach or offers or anything like that.

“We made contact with everyone featured in the Fox tribute reel halfway through our end credits — and that’s dozens of actors who have been a part of that legacy. That was fun to build a love letter to those years, those characters, and all the actors who played them.”

When asked if there were any legacy characters he wanted in the film but that ultimately didn’t pan out, Levy said:

“When you go into the MCU and have unlimited access to this legacy of characters, you have to be your own disciplinarian. We wanted the movie to, above all, be warm-hearted.

“It can’t be emotional or poignant if you’re not vested in these characters. We didn’t want to go so crazy with the multiverse that you take your eye off the balls that count most. We were judicious. Several of these characters were in early drafts of the scripts and never changed.

“Pyro made sense because we knew Johnny Storm was going to be in the movie. And who has a certain superheroic capacity with fire? Pyro. Other ideas were more personal. Zeb Wells, one of our co-writers, has always been a mad fan of Tyler Mane’s Sabretooth.

“He wrote Sabretooth into a first draft, and it never left because it got him so excited, and that made the rest of us so excited. Others along the way, like the Blob and Azazel, evolved over eight months of pre-production.

“There was a brief conversation about, ‘Should we do the Vinnie Jones’ Juggernaut? Should we do a CGI juggernaut?’ Ultimately, we thought that we had enough bringbacks in Aaron Stanford, Tyler, Jen and Wesley that we thought, ‘Let’s do another variant [with a different actor] and keep it non-CGI.’ So we used Aaron Reed, who plays Dude in Free Guy.”

I thought for sure Affleck would show up in the movie if Electra was in it, so I was surprised when he didn’t. Regardless, the movie turned out great and the movie ended up having having just the right amount of cameos.