Avengers: Doomsday left Alan Cumming puzzled: "I don't fully understand the plot"

On a recent SiriusXM spot, Alan Cumming said Marvel ’s tight-lipped ways left him working largely in the dark on Avengers: Doomsday—even as he steps back into the blue as Nightcrawler. Most of his scenes were shot on empty stages against blue screens, he explained, with little sense of how the larger crossover fit together.

“I don’t fully understand the plot.”

Cumming described one rare day on a backlot when a crew member started walking him through an effects-heavy sequence with giant robots. He waved off the explanation and asked for the basics: where to look, where to move. The job, as he put it, was to hit marks and sprint, not memorize lore on the fly.

That patchwork approach tracks with how this movie is being built. Joe Russo recently said the script kept changing as they filmed, calling it a “living organism.” Cumming also ran into one of the odder side effects of that secrecy at the Emmys, where he joked to Florence Pugh that she had apparently lain on top of him for a shot—only for them to realize they’d each filmed with the other’s body double and never actually met on set.

The Spider- Man question

One mystery Marvel die-hards won’t let go: whether Andrew Garfield swings through Doomsday. Marvel hasn’t announced him, and in a GQ interview Garfield flatly said no. Fans haven’t forgotten, though, that he denied returning before Spider-Man: No Way Home—right up until he appeared alongside Tom Holland and Tobey Maguire. As Variety noted, that history makes his latest denial harder to take at face value.

None of that means Garfield is secretly in this one; his involvement is unconfirmed. He has, however, said he’d be open to playing Spider-Man again if the idea felt worth doing.