X-Men Star Teases Cameo, Says He Was Left ‘Astonished’ by Deadpool & Wolverine

As is now expected, Deadpool & Wolverine has been every bit the secretive MCU installment as Avengers: Endgame. There have been a few hints at who from franchise’s past is returning via the film’s marketing materials, but only hints. For instance, Kelly Hu’s Lady Deathstrike and Jason Flemyng’s Azazel were seen in some of the film’s most recent images. Then there are those who were revealed to be returning early on. For instance, Jennifer Garner’s Elektra and Aaron Stanford’s Pyro. And, now that the marketing machine for the film is ramping up, Stanford has sat down with Entertainment Weekly to shed some light on what part he will play in the film’s narrative and what impressed him most about the Marvel sequel’s production…

“The very first set I saw was this just gigantic desert wasteland with all of these practical set pieces that stretched the length of a football field. I would certainly have expected something like that to be all green screen, but the pains that were taken and the amount of resources and labor that had to go into physically building this world just absolutely astonished me.”

For those who are fans of practical effects over CGI and green screen, this is assuredly welcome news. Of course, audiences have already seen the locale he’s referring to, given how it’s already been revealed as Cassandra Nova’s headquarters. Specifically, a massive Ant-Man helmet (with the deceased superhero’s skull within) planted out in the middle of the desert.

Aaron Stanford Reveals His Favorite Changes to the Character in Deadpool & Wolverine

As anyone who has seen the original X-Men trilogy knows, Pyro never gets to wear a proper comic book costume and is just in a jacket throughout much of X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand. That will change with Deadpool & Wolverine, in which Stanford will be decked out in a costume directly inspired by what his character wears in Marvel’s Ultimate Universe. And it’s something that the actor reveled in…

“I was just very happy to even have a costume. In the original X-Men films, Pyro gets really shortchanged in terms of a costume…In X2, we start off with Pyro in Xavier’s School for Gifted Mutants…the SWAT team bursts in in the middle of the night and we have to flee. So for half the movie, I’m in my jammies. I never got the cool leather, tactical suit that all the X-Men wear. And in X3, I was just dressed in an ensemble from Hot Topic, basically. So to have him be in a proper superhero costume that was actually taken from the comics themselves was very cool.”

Deadpool & Wolverine looks to be the exact push of the reset button the MCU needs right now. Its reputation has fallen the past few years, with projects such as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania not only failing to stand apart, but failing to even have impressive special effects and action sequences. So, here’s hoping that Deadpool & Wolverine’s utilization of practical sets will at least tackle the latter problem.

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In terms of the former problem, the Deadpool franchise is inherently different from anything else in the MCU. And, going off the marketing material, the new installment looks no different. It should prove to be quite the hit when it debuts in theaters later this month.