Alan Cumming Opens Up About Filming Avengers: Doomsday in Isolation

Alan Cumming has shed new light on his unusual experience filming Avengers: Doomsday, revealing that his entire shoot as Nightcrawler was carried out in complete isolation, surrounded only by green screens and stand-ins. Speaking with Gold Derby, the actor admitted he often had no idea which fellow characters or actors his scenes would eventually be stitched together with.

“They even gave characters fake names,” he said. “Half the time I didn’t know who I was acting with.”

Cumming’s return as the teleporting mutant comes more than two decades after his first turn in 2003’s X2, a shoot he once described as “miserable” under disgraced director Bryan Singer. This time, however, he called the process “really healing,” even if he barely interacted with other performers. His filming wrapped earlier than the rest of the cast so he could begin work on The Traitors, which may explain the heavy reliance on digital trickery.

The production approach speaks volumes about modern blockbuster filmmaking. Scenes are increasingly assembled like puzzle pieces – actors filmed separately, dialogue exchanged with no one in the room, and entire sequences dependent on post-production wizardry. It has left some fans worried that the immersion will vanish when they realize just how artificial the movie-making process has become.

Despite the isolated shoot, Cumming is still expected – through the magic of visual effects – to share screen time with returning X-Men legends like Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, Ian McKellen’s Magneto, Rebecca Romijn’s Mystique, and Kelsey Grammer’s Beast. The film is positioned as a crucial bridge to Marvel’s planned semi-reboot: after Avengers: Doomsday and the upcoming Secret Wars, a younger X-Men team will take the spotlight in a new feature directed by Jake Schreier.

For now, Cumming’s candid remarks highlight both the strengths and the flaws of today’s Marvel machine: efficient, digitally seamless, but perhaps at the cost of the very human interactions that made audiences fall in love with these characters in the first place.