Image via Marvel
When he was at his child’s birthday party, Don Cheadle received an invitation to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The 58-year-old discussed how he joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) in 2010’s Iron Man 2, taking Terrence Howard’s place as James “Rhodey” Rhodes, nicknamed War Machine, in a new interview with GQ.
“I was at my kid’s laser tag birthday party, and they called me and said, ‘This is what’s happening, we’re giving you the offer. If you don’t say yes, we’re going to the next person, this has to be—this is gonna happen very fast,’” he recalled. “So they said, ‘Why don’t you go ahead and take an hour and decide if you want to do it?’”
He added, “It was a six-movie deal. I was like, ‘In an hour I have to decide? But like, what are the other movies?’ They’re like, ‘It’s gonna be these Avengers, these many [Iron Man films], this is what it is, so you kinda have to say yes or no, if you’re in or out.’”
Marvel did not react to Cheadle’s request for information on the arc his character would go through, “We can’t, we don’t know any of that. But this is what it is, so you’ve got an hour.”
To accommodate the birthday party, the powers that be doubled Cheadle’s minuscule window to decide. “So we played laser tag for two hours. And I was talking to my wife, and we just kind of thought about it and talked to my agent and tried to get as much information as we could and…said, ‘Okay, we’ll do it,’” he remembered.