Avengers: Doomsday Actor Alan Cumming Says He Filmed His Scenes ‘In Isolation’ Using Green Screen and Often Didn’t Know Who He Was Supposed to Be Acting With

X-Men and The Traitors star Alan Cumming has revealed more about his time recently filming Avengers: Doomsday, and said he spent the shoot alone.

Cumming previously acknowledged he had already wrapped filming on next year’s Avengers blockbuster earlier than other cast members, as his schedule then required him to go work on the next season of The Traitors.

Perhaps to accomodate this, Cumming’s time reprising his X2 role of Nightcrawler was relatively brief compared to some other Avengers stars – with overall shooting on the movie expected to continue on still for several months.

“I did the entire film in isolation,” Cumming told Gold Derby. “Lots of green screen, face replacement. They even gave characters fake names. I don’t know who I was acting with half the time.”

Intriguingly, Cumming appeared to then reference a previous statement he made about sharing a fight scene with Reed Richards actor Pedro Pascal, and suggested what he had said may actually not be the case due to this confusion.

“I broke the internet by mentioning something once,” Cumming noted, “but honestly, I might have got it wrong.”

Despite all this, Cumming previously described his overall experience returning to the character of Nightcrawler as “really healing” after the “miserable” time he spent shooting classic X-Men movie X2 under the now-disgraced director Bryan Singer.

Avengers: Doomsday will see the return of numerous X-Men actors from Fox’s older mutant movies. Presumably via the magic of green screen, at least, Cumming is expected to share screen time with Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, Kelsey Grammer’s Beast, James Marsden’s Cyclops, Rebecca Romijn’s Mystique, and Ian McKellen’s Magneto.

Following the events of Avengers: Doomsday and the subsequent Avengers: Secret Wars, Marvel boss Kevin Feige has said that a semi-rebooted timeline will see a new, younger X-Men team come to the fore, in a fresh X-Men movie set to be directed by Thunderbolts*/The New Avengers’ Jake Schreier.

Image credit: Amy Sussman/Getty Images

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social