One of the weirdest and wildest films of this year or any other, Deadpool & Wolverine is a masterclass in surprise superhero cameos, with familiar faces such as Wesley Snipes’ unexpected return as Blade and Henry Cavill’s Wolvie variant among many others. (Read our D&W review here.) That said, not all of the sequel’s live-action comic characters were direct reprisals from past projects. Cassandra Nova’s squad boasts several recast villains, including famed Punisher foe The Russian, who was portrayed by WWE icon Kevin Nash in the 2004 film.
Unsurprisingly for anyone who already knows how outspoken Nash has been throughout his career, the NWO co-founder had a particularly hilarious and semi-scathing reaction to seeing someone else wearing the character’s red and white stripes in the third Deadpool movie. Addressing the matter on his podcast Kliq THIS, Nash offered up this amusing barb:
That doesn’t even…that looks nothing like the character I played. That looks nothing like The Russian. It looks like they gave somebody a favor.
That’s not a quote that’ll be used in any Deadpool & Wolverine marketing, but it’s a hilarious pull-quote nonetheless. While Kevin Nash doesn’t directly say that he would have signed on to play The Russian within the blockbuster’s Void scenes, but it doesn’t sound like he would have rudely scoffed at the idea, even 20 years after he last played the role.
Then again, maybe I’m making all the wrong assumptions, as Nash followed that up by calling out fans and detractors who might assume he’s only talking smack because he’s thirsty for movie roles. Here’s his sarcasm-dripping piece about that:
I love when people say, 'Oh, Nash is trolling for movie parts.’ Hey, guys, again, man, I'm 65 years old. What do you think I’m [doing]? Yeah, what I want to do in life is, I want to go someplace that's not my crib, and be in a hotel, and work a 12-hour day. And then leave, and go home, and while I cook and prepare my meal and eat it, go over lines for tomorrow. And while I sit in makeup the next day, have somebody run lines with me, and then every time I get a break, run lines again before we shoot a scene, or a scene we’re not in, to find somebody to run lines with.
Nash went on to say that anybody who doesn’t know their lines and doesn’t know their roles will never make it as an actor, and that it’s a hard gig. So at this age, he’s perhaps not vociferously champing at the bit to jump into any upcoming Marvel movies that would require such lengthy workdays and streamlined attention. I know I’d love to see him back as Super Shredder in some capacity in the world of the Ninja Turtles, but I’m not holding out many hopes.
For those wondering why Deadpool & Wolverine didn’t go the whole 99 yards to bring back every possible actor and character from non-MCU canon, there isn’t just a single reason. Some of it was a financial issue, which Ryan Reynolds addressed when talking out why 2015’s Fantastic Four characters weren’t in the cameo mix.
And as far as the decisions went on a character-by-character basis, director Shawn Levy said this to Variety:
We didn’t want to go so crazy with the multiverse that you take your eye off the balls that count most. We were judicious. Several of these characters were in 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 a certain superheroic capacity with fire? Pyro. Other ideas were more personal. Zeb Wells, one of our co-writers, has always been a mad fan of Tyler Mane’s Sabretooth. He wrote Sabretooth into a first draft, and it never left because it got him so excited, and that made the rest of us so excited. Others along the way, like the Blob and Azazel, evolved over eight months of pre-production.
For my money, I'd rather see Kevin Nash return as The Russian in Disney+'s upcoming Marvel series Daredevil: Born Again, since we know Jon Bernthal's Punisher is involved. But until we find out more about that show, we'll just have to watch Deadpool & Wolverine continue to rake in the money at the box office.
