Shawn Levy says Ben Affleck was one of 70 Marvel characters on the first list they wanted in DEADPOOL and WOLVERINE

There have been a lot of incredibly funny cameos in Deadpool and Wolverinebut there were also a lot of rumors about cameos before the movie came out that never came to pass. That’s not to say that some of those characters weren’t on the list at some point.

Some of those early entries included Ben Affleck, Halle Berry, James Marsdenand many others. During a recent interview with Variety, the director by Shawn Levi was asked if Affleck was one of the actors in talks to join the cast, since he was named 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 going through a menu of 70 Marvel character names, Daredevil was on one of those lists, but never from those early conversations, and never to the point of contact or offers or anything like that.

“We reached out to everyone who appeared in the Fox mid-credits tribute, and there are dozens of actors who have been part of that legacy. It was fun to write a love letter to those years, those characters, and all the actors who played them.”

When asked if there were any historical figures he would have liked to include in the film, but ultimately didn’t work out, Levy said:

“When you come into the MCU and have unlimited access to this legacy of characters, you have to be your own disciplinarian. We wanted the film to be, first and foremost, warm.

“It can’t be emotional or touching if you’re not invested in these characters. We didn’t want to go so crazy with the multiverse that we took our eyes off the balls that mattered most. We were judicious. A lot of these characters were in the 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 some superhero ability with fire? Pyro. Other ideas were more personal. Zeb Wells, one of our co-writers, has always been a huge fan of Tyler Mane’s Sabretooth.

“He wrote Sabretooth in an early draft, and he never left it because it made him so excited, and that made the rest of us so excited. Others along the way, like Blob and Azazel, evolved in eight months of pre-production.

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

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