Alan Cumming says he does not understand the Avengers: Doomsday plot

Alan Cumming has finished work on Avengers: Doomsday and still cannot explain it. “To be honest, I don’t fully understand the plot,” he told SiriusXM Hits 1 in an interview detailed by Variety.

Cumming returns as Nightcrawler, the blue-skinned mutant who can vanish and reappear elsewhere. It is his first outing in the role in 23 years, after his debut in X2: X-Men United, with no other X-Men film in between. He joins other returning X-Men actors Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Rebecca Romijn and James Marsden in the Marvel ensemble.

Secrecy is part of the reason for the confusion. Cumming said Marvel did not let him read the full screenplay. His direction, as he put it, boiled down to running around.

Most of his shoot took place in front of a blue screen, a plain coloured backdrop with scenery and creatures added later, with only rare days on the backlot, the studio’s outdoor standing set. In one scene a crew member started to describe giant robots around him. Cumming said he stopped him and asked to simply be told where to point.

The strangest moment came away from the set. Cumming said he spoke to Florence Pugh at the Emmys and told her he had never met her, but her body double had lain on top of him. Pugh answered that she had lain on top of him, but it was his body double, according to Variety. The pair never filmed together, with stand-ins shooting a sequence where one lies directly on top of the other, as reported by Yahoo.

What makes this stand out is how little has changed and how much has. The Nightcrawler look remains fiddly, but the make-up chair time has fallen from about four and a half hours to 90 minutes. The curved tattoos on his face were once painted by hand and now stick on.

Avengers: Doomsday opens in theatres on Dec. 18. The SiriusXM Hits 1 chat, posted under the title “I’m not confident I understand the ‘Avengers’ plot either”, captures the tone of a big effects film kept tightly under wraps.