I Thought I Was Done With The MCU, But Avengers: Doomsday Just Cast Alan Cumming

Man. Just when I thought I could finally leave the Marvel Cinematic Universe behind, they went ahead and added Alan Cumming to their proverbial Infinity Gauntlet ... and just like that, I'm back in.

Let me explain. I've been a fan of the MCU for a while now; I'll admit, to the likely horror of any purists reading this, that I'm extremely unfamiliar with the comic books themselves, but I watched all four initial phases of the MCU religiously and even managed to fit in a chronological rewatch during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. Frankly, for a long time, it was my job to care about the MCU, until it wasn't. I don't need to get into all the specifics of how the proverbial sausage is made, but once I was no longer professionally obligated to keep up with the MCU, I just sort of ... stopped, because honestly? I was somehow both bored and overwhelmed.

At a certain point, any involvement in the MCU just felt like homework — and by that, I mean that in order to watch one MCU project, I had to watch like, five others to even sort of understand what was going on. This was too large of a commitment for me, a person prone to bouts of intellectual laziness that result in me turning on a "Vanderpump Rules" marathon for the millionth time. Now? Everything's different. In a live stream on YouTube, Marvel Studios announced cast members simply by showing their names on the backs of "on-set" chairs, and based on everything I've told you up until this point, imagine my shock when I learned that Alan Cumming, one of my favorite actors of all time, will appear in "Avengers: Doomsday." This, to put it bluntly, rules, because Cumming isn't just one of the most talented performers working today. He also might be the most fun performer working today.

The first major news we got about "Avengers: Doomsday" was that Robert Downey Jr. will return to the MCU as Doctor Doom, which was a decidedly not fun piece of news; Downey Jr. won an Oscar in 2024 for "Oppenheimer" and seemed like he'd permanently left the cinematic universe behind, and honestly, it felt like a huge bummer that the very dead Tony Stark was coming back to the MCU as a different character for no apparent reason other than "wow, look at that!" The really, really good news about Alan Cumming joining the MCU is he makes projects fun, fresh, and exciting, and he's exactly the kind of shot in the arm this entire enterprise needs.

Cumming, a guy who once released a fragrance simply called "Cumming" and operates a super-inclusive cabaret space in New York City called Club Cumming, knows the real meaning of the word "camp," and to quote Jenna Maroney on "30 Rock," it seems like he "lives theatrically in everyday life." From "Romy & Michele's High School Reunion" to "Josie and the Pussycats" to his long-running role on "The Good Wife" and his current hosting gig on "The Traitors" — which earned him two Emmys — Cumming brings a sense of whimsy to everything he touches, and he pretty much always makes a concept better than it has any right to be. (For God's sake, he's good enough on "The Traitors" as an exaggerated version of himself that he almost makes you believe he owns that castle.) 

We don't know, as of this writing, precisely who Alan Cumming will play in "Avengers: Doomsday," but based on the fact that the X-Men are finally back in the on-screen Marvel family and a whole bunch of actors from that franchise are also set to return, he's probably going to play Nightcrawler, his evil teleporting mutant from "X2: X-Men United." Though Cumming has publicly said he didn't enjoy working on "X2" due to the difficult work environment, describing himself as a "miserable blue mutant" — which was, very likely, due to the fact that the movie was helmed by disgraced director Bryan Singer — he also recently described "X2" as the "gayest film that [he's] ever done" in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, so perhaps he felt like he could return to this universe now that Singer is out of the picture.

The bottom line here is that Cumming is an utter delight. He's an incredibly talented performer in essentially every way that matters — he's just as phenomenal onstage in shows like "Cabaret" as he is on either the big or small screen — but he also makes everything he's in fun and irreverent and even joyful, and he's exactly what this next Marvel Cinematic Universe project needs. We need this whole thing to be a little less serious and a little more campy, and nobody can do that like Cumming.