Whether Nicholas Hoult likes the new concept for the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday project, or he is a big fan of Kelsey Grammer, just a nice, diplomatic guy, or all of it has something to do with his move from Marvel movie project to DC ones, it is not so easy to tell. In any case, in a recent interview, he confirmed he will not be coming back as Beast in this project, and expressed no regrets about it.
Hoult primarily noted his admiration for the return of Grammer as the Beast.
"Kelsey was a great Beast. He was the Beast I saw when I was a kid, along with the other actors that they're bringing back, Patrick and Ian and James and all them," Hoult told Entertainment Weekly.
It turns out that the new cast will actually be the old one, with all reprising their mutant roles from the lost era of X-Men movies - Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier, Ian McKellen as Magneto, James Marsden as Cyclops, Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler, and Rebecca Romijn as Mystique.
"Those were the characters that I got to watch in X-Men movies," Hoult said. "I'm excited to see what they do with it. It'll be fun to see how they incorporate those characters into that world."
At the same time, Hoult noted that he was not in talks with Marvel about returning as Beast. If that has anything to do with his forthcoming role as Lex Luthor in DC’s Superman, which is to start showing this summer, we just may not find out.
There just might be a change in concept for Doomsday going on at Marvel - instead of relying on Hoult and other actors who played the younger versions of X-Men who will not be coming back, it is the idea to bring back as many of the old ones as possible.
Along with all the names mentioned above, Doomsday will feature vets including Robert Downey Jr. (now playing arch villain Doctor Victor von Doom), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Paul Rudd (Ant-Man), and Simu Liu (Shang-Chi). Letitia Wright (Shuri/the new Black Panther), Tenoch Huerta Mejia (Namor the Submariner), and Winston Duke (M'Baku) will return, repping the Wakanda side of the MCU.
Just as a reminder, the X-Men film series launched in 2000. At the time, it helped popularize the superhero movie genre in Hollywood alongside the Blade and Spider-Man movies. As far as Grammer’s repeated role as Beast, he first played the character in X-Men: The Last Stand, with the character being depicted as the Secretary of Mutant Affairs. He later cameoed in X-Men: Days of Future Past.
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