by Sure, you know your Robert Downeys from your Chris Hemsworths, but do you know how MCU actors were chosen in the first place? The Marvel Cinematic Universe might be the biggest film franchise in the galaxy now, but it wasn’t always that way, and the iconic actors who brought the comics to life haven’t always been household names.
Did you know Chris Evans turned down Captain America multiple times? Did you know Chris Pratt initially didn’t want anything to do with Star-Lord? Or that Scarlett Johansson was actually Marvel’s second choice for Black Widow? There are a lot of fascinating tidbits about Marvel’s casting process. Read on to find out how your favorite superheroes – and supervillains – got the job.
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- Iron Man
- Paramount Pictures
It’s hard to even fathom now, but Marvel’s casting of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark was a huge gamble for the fledgling studio at the time. After becoming a young star in the 1980s, Downey had become a Hollywood malcontent, best known for his erratic behavior and years of substance problems. This didn’t stop Iron Man director Jon Favreau from fighting tooth and nail to bring Downey aboard.
During a 2014 interview with Texas radio station 100.3 Jack FM, Favreau explained that he essentially forced the studio to accept Downey – who by that point had started rehabilitating his career but in largely small and arthouse fare like Zodiac and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – as Tony Stark: “It was my job as a director to show that it was the best choice creatively… and now the Marvel Universe is the biggest franchise in film history.” Especially in retrospect, it’s pretty much impossible to argue against that.
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Chris Evans Repeatedly Turned Down Captain America – Until His Mom Changed His Mind
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- Avengers: Age of Ultron
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Becoming the face of a major film franchise can be quite a daunting thing. Getting the role of one of the most enduring superheroes of all time is something that would functionally change your life; after all, you’d be recognized everywhere you go. That’s exactly what crossed Chris Evans’s mind when Marvel Studios came calling about him playing Captain America, a role he would’ve turned down for good if it weren’t for his mom.
In 2020, Chris’s mother, Lisa Evans, was interviewed by Esquire and explained how she convinced the future Steve Rogers to take the role. “I said to him, ‘Look, you want to do acting work for the rest of your life? If you do this part, you will have the opportunity,'” she explained. “You’ll never have to worry about paying the rent. If you take the part, you just have to decide, ‘It’s not going to affect my life negatively – it will enable it.'”
Given that the Cap role turned Evans into a bona fide star, it just goes to show: Always listen to your mother.
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- Thor: The Dark World
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
After years of Chris Hemsworth playing Thor – with more to come in the future – it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing the God of Thunder, let alone his own younger brother, Liam. Alas, Chris apparently blew his first audition with Thor director Kenneth Branagh while Liam ended up making it to the final round of callbacks for the hammer-wielding superhero.
Speaking to W Magazine in 2017, Chris explained how a last-ditch effort to beat his brother to the role ended up getting him back in the conversation. “So I did an audition in Vancouver in this hotel room with my mum reading Anthony Hopkins’s part,” he clarified. “She must have nailed it because it got me back in the room and that second audition was a lot different than my first one.”
It feels safe to say, in hindsight, Marvel decided on the correct Hemsworth.
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- Marvel’s The Avengers
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
In a classic case of everybody wins, Scarlett Johansson only booked the role of Black Widow once Emily Blunt had to bow out due to a contractual obligation. That contractual obligation? Starring in the mostly forgotten 2010 Jack Black comedy Gulliver’s Travels. Ouch.
Johansson has elaborated on her MCU casting on numerous occasions. She told Variety in 2023 that she felt “really frustrated and hopeless” after being turned down for both the lead in Gravity and Black Widow initially, saying that “[t]he work [she] was being offered felt deeply unfulfilling.” On the flip side, in an interview with Parade in 2020, Johansson stated, “The best call you can receive is after you are rejected for something and then you get it. You appreciate it more. I’ve basically made a career out of being second choice.”
Johansson has gone on to make the Marvel hero her own, with a solo movie in the offing, and Blunt has done just fine in the years since leaving the part on the table, starring in major action-adventure movies of her own like Edge of Tomorrow, The Huntsman: Winter’s War, and Jungle Cruise. Sometimes things just tend to work out for all involved.
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- Avengers: Infinity War
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Sometimes you just get lucky enough to have immense opportunities fall right into your lap. This is what happened to Chadwick Boseman when he was offered the role that would make him a household name on a silver platter right out of the clear blue sky.
While promoting his 2014 James Brown biopic Get On Up, Boseman received a fortuitous phone call. He went into detail during a Black Panther press conference:
I was coming off the red carpet for Get On Up and my agent was like, “You’ve gotta get on the phone.” And the crazy thing is I didn’t even have international calling on my phone until that morning. In an interview I heard someone say, “Get international on your phone and call your mom,” [then] important stuff, literally, happened that night.
That call was Marvel offering him the role of Black Panther straight up, with no audition or anything. Talk about good fortune.
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- Captain America: Civil War
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Going up against 7,000 actors for one of the most coveted roles in Hollywood doesn’t leave you with great odds in the grand scheme of things. Tom Holland knew he was a long shot to get cast as the MCU’s version of Peter Parker, but he did have an ace in his pocket that ended up making him stand out: gymnastics skills.
Holland told the Associated Press that he wanted to showcase those abilities in his audition tape in order to make him stand out from the massive pack. “They gave me two scenes… and I basically did like a somersault into frame, and then a somersault out of frame, because I was basically like, ‘They may never see this, but if they do, I need them to know that I’ve got some gymnastic abilities and stuff.'” Holland’s physicality and agility helped give him the edge he was looking for, and the rest is history.
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- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
The unsung hero of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is unquestionably Sarah Finn, the casting director responsible for the majority of fantastic casting choices throughout the MCU’s 23 films thus far. And she is directly responsible for both getting Chris Pratt to audition for the role of Star-Lord – after he initially wanted no part of it whatsoever – and convincing director James Gunn to accept Pratt as the ideal choice.
“James Gunn has been very generous about this in saying that I, to the point of annoying him, kept insisting that Chris Pratt was the guy for the part,” Finn told People. “But Chris didn’t want to play the part and refused to audition. I finally got him to audition and James Gunn said he didn’t want to see him, and that was really a challenge.” Nowadays, everyone knows Pratt is leading man material, and it’s all thanks to Finn.
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- Marvel’s The Avengers
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
When you get chosen to be a major player in a gigantic motion picture like 2012’s The Avengers, it doesn’t seem to make much sense to try and talk the studio out of casting you. Still, this is what Mark Ruffalo attempted when he was initially being cast to replace Edward Norton as the MCU’s Hulk. Talk about some serious cold feet.
“I did try to talk them out of casting me,” Ruffalo remembered while talking with Variety in 2020. “I said, ‘I don’t know if I’m the right guy, I’ve never done anything like this.’ Between Joss [Whedon] and Robert [Downey], they were pretty convincing that I could do it. I was scared. I was really scared. I’m still scared.” It’s for the best that Ruffalo overcame his fears of playing the not-so-jolly green giant, as he’s become an integral player in the juggernaut franchise, as well as a fan favorite.
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In the years since Ant-Man‘s release, much has been made of the film’s original director, Edgar Wright, leaving the project due to creative differences with Marvel Studios. When a director of Wright’s caliber – this is a guy responsible for numerous cult classics like Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World – leaves a major project like Ant-Man, people are bound to notice. Especially when the lead only got the role thanks to the outgoing director in the first place.
Marvel wanted Joseph Gordon-Levitt for the role, but Wright fought for Paul Rudd, and Rudd was eventually hired to bring Scott Lang to life. When asked by Screen Rant how he came to be cast, Rudd explained it was all Wright. “Edgar is the one that came to me, and Edgar I’ve known for years and I’m a fan of his,” Rudd recalled. “There were so many things that were really interesting and appealing, but when I signed on it was through him. He’s responsible for me being here.”
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- Avengers: Infinity War
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Benedict Cumberbatch was always Marvel’s first choice to play the Sorcerer Supreme, but the actor couldn’t shoot the role as originally planned due to his run on a stage production of Hamlet. The studio went back to the drawing board and thought about casting other A-listers like Ryan Gosling or Joaquin Phoenix. Eventually, the powers that be decided they still wanted Cumberbatch, and ended up pushing back the entire production schedule in order to fit the actor’s complicated acting commitments.
According to a behind-the-scenes featurette, Cumberbatch’s schedule was so jam-packed, less than 36 hours after he wrapped his final stage performance of Hamlet in London, he was out in Nepal working on set for Doctor Strange. Talk about some serious commitment to your craft.
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- Guardians of the Galaxy
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Even though big names like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and John Cena have successfully made the jump from the wrestling ring to Hollywood, there seems to be a stigma when it comes to wrestlers getting a fair shake in the audition process. Take Dave Bautista’s eventual casting as Drax the Destroyer, for example. Marvel apparently didn’t want to audition any pro wrestlers for the role, and it came down to Bautista’s relentless agent getting him a lucky foot in the door.
According to Bautista, it was “a nightmare”:
I was terrified. I was really desperate at the time, I had hardly worked in three years, and I had gone broke from wrestling and I was desperate to get a job. I finally got an agent like two weeks before I got the audition for Guardians. My agent says, “You know, I really had to fight to get you this audition. It was really hard to get, they didn’t really want to audition you.”
It’s safe to assume Marvel is glad it took a chance on auditioning the former wrestling star.
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- Thor: Ragnarok
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Here’s a fun thought experiment: Try picturing Tom Hiddleston as Thor. It doesn’t quite make sense in your head, does it? Maybe it’s because Hiddleston seems too slight in build to play a truly comics-accurate Thor. Or maybe it’s because he’s become so ingrained in the public consciousness as the weaselly trickster god, Loki. Suffice it to say, Hiddleston’s Thor would just look… not right. But that was the role he originally auditioned for!
During an interview on The Tonight Show, Hiddleston explained the production team was only looking for unknown actors at the time, in order to keep audiences engaged with the characters as opposed to the actors. “They just wanted people to see these new characters, these new actors,” he said. “The remit was if you were over 6 foot and you’ve got blond hair, you could come and have a pop at it. I never auditioned for Loki, I only ever auditioned for Thor, which is nuts.”
So how did he wind up as Loki, despite never even auditioning? It basically boiled down to a lot of non-Marvel familiarity with the director, Kenneth Branagh:
He saw me in a Shakespeare production in a theater in London, then asked me to perform with him in the television series Wallander for the BBC. We then did a Chekhov play in the West End, and then he cast me as Loki in the first Thor film. So actually we ended up spending about 12 months working together in different media.
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After becoming famous thanks to a starring role on ABC’s hit television show Lost, Evangeline Lilly thought she might retire from acting for good once the show ended in 2011. She told The Hollywood Reporter how she “was instantly launched into international stardom, and that was really uncomfortable for me. I instantly balked, didn’t know how to deal with it, and felt very uncomfortable after that situation. I ended up deciding to retire after I finished Lost.”
After a two-year hiatus from Hollywood, it was Peter Jackson calling about a role in The Hobbit films and Marvel calling about a role in Ant-Man immediately afterward that brought her back from a full-blown retirement with her family in Hawaii. Working on big-budget blockbusters is a solid way to come out of retirement, if you can get the work.
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- Avengers: Infinity War
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Unconvinced he wanted to step into the Marvel Cinematic Universe as major Infinity-saga baddie Thanos, Josh Brolin decided to call up another Marvel actor who had reservations about his own Marvel casting a few years earlier. It turns out Mark Ruffalo, Hulk himself, was the one who was able to convince Brolin to hop aboard Marvel’s money train.
Speaking with Total Film, Brolin recounted his conversation with Ruffalo. “At the beginning, before I said yes, I called Mark Ruffalo,” the actor recalled. “And I said, ‘What do you think of this?’ He was like, ‘It’s going to be really uncomfortable in the beginning, and then you see the movie, and you’ll just be absolutely blown away by the stuff you were doing.'”
Thanks to Ruffalo, Brolin became the villain in the highest-grossing film of all time. Not too shabby.
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- Avengers: Infinity War
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Elizabeth Olsen has made the role of Scarlet Witch her own since her first appearance in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Given the popularity of her Disney + series WandaVision, it’s safe to assume she’ll keep playing the mysteriously powerful Wanda Maximoff for years to come. Olsen’s role in the MCU wasn’t always set in stone, though.
Olsen was apparently one of the many famous actors who read for Sharon Carter’s first role in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, along with Anna Kendrick, Emilia Clarke, Felicity Jones, and Alison Brie. After being passed over for that role, she eventually booked the Scarlet Witch part – but not before the internet was running rampant with rumors of Saoirse Ronan getting the role. The Academy Award-nominated actress would eventually shoot down these rumors and Olsen landed the role instead.
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- Captain America: The Winter Soldier
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Way back during the halcyon days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sebastian Stan – known for his MCU role as Bucky Barnes, AKA the Winter Soldier – first read for the role of Captain America. That role, which surely would’ve made him a true Hollywood star, went to Chris Evans. Stan, meanwhile, got the second place trophy with his casting as Bucky – but he doesn’t see it that way.
While talking with CNBC, Stan explained that everything actually worked out in his favor as Bucky is a “much better role.” And with the character starring in the Disney+ series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, you can see his point. In dealing with Hollywood rejection, Stan said it’s important to “try not to take things personally, learn how to face rejection, no matter what you do, stay obsessed with it.” Hard to argue with the results.
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