Stan Lee's 'The Defenders' Cameo Has Been Revealed

You know the drill by now. At some point in every Marvel movie, an elderly gentleman with a familiar face will arrive on screen. Sometimes he'll literally just walk through the frame. Other times, he'll be involved in some kind of sight gag. If the filmmakers are feeling really confident, they may even give him a quick line or two, something that can make use of his innate but specific charisma because he's not a real actor. And then the audience will chuckle (there may be a smattering of applause if it's opening night) because they recognized Stan Lee. It's a tradition.

So yeah, of course Netflix's upcoming The Defenders series will feature a cameo from Marvel's mighty mustached mascot. And if you'd like to know the specifics and don't mind the surprise being ruined, you can check that out below.

To be fair, there's not much of a surprise to be ruined here. While the Marvel Studios movies actually work his cameos into the action onscreen, Lee's television cameos have been easter eggs – you have to find 'em. In Daredevil and Jessica Jones, he was a photo on the wall of an NYPD police precinct. In Luke Cage, he was pictured on an NYPD poster.

It seems that The Defenders will continue this trend, as Reddit has shared photo from the set that finds Krysten Ritter's super-powered private detective Jessica Jones standing in front of an NYPD poster featuring a friendly uniformed officer and words to the effect of "not all heroes wear capes." And yes, that officer is Lee. This means Lee has played janitors and generals and bus drivers and FedEx drivers and tow truck drivers and victims of gamma-irradiated soda and cops in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He really does get around.

And while some fans may be disappointed to see that Lee's Netflix cameos are so minor, it makes sense. The man is 94 years old and traveling to hectic television sets so he can give audiences a self-congratulatory chuckle is probably not his idea of a good time. After all, he's stepping away from the convention scene and has revealed that he can't even read comics anymore because of his failing eyesight. We can probably expect his next cameos to be similarly minor, especially since Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn has directed several of them in advance, presumably so they can be worked into future films without asking Lee to travel.