Stan Lee was famous for performing brief (and often showstopping) cameos in films from the Marvel Universe he created, with walk-on parts in hundreds of movies and TV shows, including X-Men (hot-dog vendor), The Amazing Spider-Man (school librarian) ,and 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, in which he was credited as “Milwaukee man drinking from bottle.”
Now, it has emerged that Avengers 4 co-director Joe Russo previously said that Lee, who died Monday at age 95, had already filmed his Avengers 4 cameo before he passed away, and will make a posthumous appearance in the movie, due to be released in theaters in May 2019.
During an interview with BBC Radio Scotland in April of this year, reported via CBR.com, Russo said of Lee, “He doesn’t love to fly, so we try to get him out for his cameos around the same time. So if we have other movies shooting on the same lot that we’re on, for instance Ant-Man 2 or Avengers 4, we group his cameos together and then move him from one set to the next and kind of get him through his cameos in one day.”
Lee had contractually obliged cameos in almost every movie based on one of his works, and had enjoyed popping up in the stories he wrote as far back as the 1960s, when he would make guest appearances on the pages of the Marvel comics he was overseeing.
Lee told Business Insider: “The artists back then would draw me in as a joke or just to have fun. And I would put some dialogue balloons there and it looked as if I intended it. I didn’t try to do cameos in those days.
“Anything that seemed fun and anything that the readers seemed to enjoy we kept doing and those things brought in a lot of fan mail,” Lee recalled. “And we weren’t doing movies or television. Our whole existence depended on comic books, so if you see that something is interesting to the fans, you stay with it.”