Alan Cumming Confesses He Still Doesn’t Get Avengers

He admits it with a laugh: on a Marvel set full of secrets, Alan Cumming sometimes feels like a passenger on a ride he hasn’t read the map for. The actor, back as Kurt Wagner—better known to fans as Nightcrawler—says he still doesn’t fully grasp the plot of Avengers: Doomsday, and his on-set anecdotes make that confusion oddly relatable.

In a recent SiriusXM interview, Cumming told a story that sums up the experience. While filming a scene away from the blue screens and visual-effects markers, a crew member explained, in grandiose terms, what the giant robots were supposed to be doing. Cumming’s response? “Thanks, but just tell me where to point and when to run.” Short. Simple. Human.

It’s not just the technical wizardry that keeps actors in the dark. Cumming admitted he didn’t even meet some co-stars face-to-face until after principal photography—Florence Pugh, for instance, was a name he hadn’t crossed paths with until an Emmys event. Surprising? Yes. Effective for secrecy? Clearly.

Marvel’s tight-lipped promotional machine is a story in itself. Cumming pointed out that nobody hands you a clear list of what you can and can’t say; sometimes you learn the boundaries the hard way. He referenced a past incident where offhand remarks about a clash involving his character and Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards sparked headlines and a stern call from marketing. “You don’t want the head of publicity on your tail,” he joked—then sighed, because it’s true.

For long-time fans, Cumming’s return as Nightcrawler is a gratifying callback—he first played the role in X2: X-Men United (2003). In Avengers: Doomsday, he’s joining a sprawling ensemble: returning X-Men faces like Rebecca Romijn, James Marsden, Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen; members of the Fantastic Four; a New Avengers lineup; leaders from Wakanda; and even Steve Rogers, played by Chris Evans. All of them head into conflict with Victor Von Doom—Doctor Doom—this time embodied by Robert Downey Jr.

So what does Cumming actually know about the story? Less than the rumor mill, more than the average moviegoer. He can tease a sense of scale—big alliances, familiar rivalries, and set pieces designed to astonish—without committing to plot points. That’s by design. Surprises are part of the currency here. And when a film trades in secrecy the way this one does, actors often get only the smallest puzzle pieces, asked to act as if they’re holding the whole picture.

There’s an odd charm in that. The more technology swallows up the practical, the more actors are asked to supply raw imagination. Cumming’s candidness—part bemusement, part acceptance—feels like a backstage pass: not to the story itself, but to the strange craft of making a blockbuster where not even the players know everything.

Avengers: Doomsday opens in theaters on December 18. Expect spectacle. Expect secrecy. Expect a few more stories from the set to surface between now and then.