Warning: This article contains spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine.
Having made an unexpected appearance in the newly released Deadpool & Wolverine film, Wesley Snipes has broken two records.
The 61-year-old actor reprised his role as Eric Brooks aka Blade, a half-vampire “daywalker” who hunts vampires.
His return comes 25 years 340 days after he first played the character in Blade (1998), meaning he beats out Hugh Jackman for the record of longest career as a live action Marvel character.
Jackman, whose first outing as Wolverine came 24 years ago in X-Men (2000), was expected to take the record from Sir Patrick Stewart upon Deadpool & Wolverine’s release.
Snipes’s surprise cameo also earned him a record for the longest gap between character appearances in Marvel films, having last played Blade 19 years 231 days ago in Blade: Trinity (2004). He surpassed Alfred Molina’s 17-year gap between playing Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021).
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Snipes revealed that he’s had some “very interesting conversations” over the past two decades about bringing Blade back, but no plans ever came to fruition.
However, that all changed when he got a phone call from Ryan Reynolds (who recently received two Guinness World Records titles of his own).
Snipes said: “I thought it didn’t make sense to me, but [when] you get a call from Ryan Reynolds out of the blue after 20 years, you go, ‘Okay, I got to take this call. Let’s see what this is about.’
“He told me the idea… They said ‘yes’ and ‘it’s a go.’ ‘If you’re in, we’re in.’ Here we are.”
Snipes worked out intensively for around a month to get his body “Blade ready”, as he wasn’t told how much action his scenes would involve – fortunately, it wasn’t as much as he’d initially expected.
In the film, he teams up with Deadpool and Wolverine alongside three other Marvel superheroes (Elektra, Gambit and X-23) to battle Cassandra Nova (played by Emma Corrin) and her horde of mutants.
This isn’t the first time Snipes has worked with Reynolds, who was 27 when he co-starred as vampire hunter Hannibal King in Blade: Trinity.
“Some of the things he did back in those days, that’s not really my humour,” Snipes said. “I’m not tuned in that way. So I thought, ‘Well, it’s a little over the top for me.’
“But seeing him do it in this context made a lot of sense. And seeing him do it and do it well, Ryan does something that most people can’t do… So it was enjoyable. It was enjoyable to work with him. It was enjoyable to revisit.”
Snipes wasn’t the only Marvel star to make a surprise appearance in Deadpool & Wolverine – Chris Evans also reprised an old role to extend his record for the most feature film appearances as a Marvel superhero, taking his total to 11.
