Robert Downey Jr. Turned Down Cameo in New Deadpool Film

Deadpool & Wolverine was stacked to the brim with cameos from other parts of Marvel cinema history, with returning characters from Fox’s X-Men universe, alternate versions of characters, and more all showing up throughout the film. One cameo, though, was written into the script but ultimately dropped when the MCU’s biggest star turned it down.

In a new interview with IndieWire, Deadpool & Wolverine writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese revealed that Robert Downey Jr. was originally planned to appear in the film in a cameo appearance. According to the duo, Downey would have appeared as the MCU’s Tony Stark – or at least some version of Tony Stark – alongside Jon Favreau, who played Happy Hogan in Iron Man 1 and 2 and made an appearance in the film.

“We had wanted him to do a cameo, we had written that scene [to start] with Happy and Downey,” Wernick says. “Behind the scenes, we didn’t know about the Doctor Doom. And there’s no way he was going to do both.”

Wernick goes on to say that they were surprised Downey turned down the role, because “no one says no to Ryan Reynolds,” and despite Reynolds giving Downey the “hard press,” they couldn’t get him on board. In hindsight, of course, having Downey show up as Tony Stark right before the announcement that he’d be returning to the MCU as Doctor Doom would be just a little bit weird and would probably take a lot of the oomph out of that announcement.

At the very least, it doesn’t sound like the scene suffered too greatly from Downey’s absence, with Reese saying that it was largely the same, just with Favreau instead of both Favreau and Downey.

“It was a version of what you saw in the sense that he rejected Wade,” Reese explained to IndieWire. “He just said he wasn’t a team player or whatever and questioned his team-player abilities. So it was actually pretty close to the scene that you saw. It just had two guys instead of one.”

Deadpool & Wolverine divided critics in their first impressions of the film ahead of its release, and while most initial impressions were positive, a few critics weren’t too impressed with some of the visuals and action scenes.

First reviews for Deadpool & Wolverine were much more positive, though, with 80% of all reviews from professional critics being positive, earning the film a Certified Fresh rating. It was clearly a smash hit with fans, too, making box office history across its opening weekend and so far having made over $900 million at the box office worldwide.