Action star Stephen Lang admits that he was never in the running to play Cable in Deadpool 2 - and in fact, he doesn't really know much about the character at all.
It was one of the hottest casting races to grace the world of superhero movies, but finding Nathan Summers, aka Cable, for Deadpool 2 eventually led to Josh Brolin securing the part. Although he already plays the Mad Titan Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Brolin will next take on Ryan Reynolds' Merc with the Mouth in director David Leitch's Deadpool sequel. However, while names like Michael Shannon and Brad Pitt were all floating around, many saw Lang as the perfect choice to play Cable. But what does the man himself have to say about it?
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Speaking to Screen Rant to promote upcoming thriller Braven, Stephen Lang revealed in our interview more details about his possible involvement with Cable and where it all went wrong. When asked whether he ever got the call from Fox, he was pretty blunt in his answer:
"No, no, I never auditioned for it and you know, truth be told, I’m fairly Cable-ignorant."
While Lang may not know much about Nathan Summers, he certainly knows Josh Brolin and even took some of the credit for Brolin nabbing his Cable role by joking that he was the one that got him buff all those years ago. As for the actual character, Lang expanded on why he isn't that savvy when it comes to the history of Cable:
"Look, my relationship with Marvel Comics goes back to the '60s when – and I’m talking about as a reader, I was right there for the first Spider-Man, I was a Fantastic Four fan, I loved Doctor Strange, I love Jim Steranko, Jack “The King” Kirby, all them, Steve Ditko, you know, I knew who they were and I was reading all that stuff, I will say that it – by the time Cable came around . . . I had kind of moved on."
We actually helped champion Lang for the part way back in 2010 with our own Lang/Cable campaign, and as the years went on, the hype surrounding Lang's casting continued. The 65-year-old even campaigned for himself to play Cable on the big screen and had no less than Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld in his corner. However, as Lang himself admits, Fox never actually approached him about the role and it just never worked out.
Given the record-breaking success of Deadpool, getting the sequel right was always going to be a major concern, especially when it came to casting Cable. We have yet to see Brolin in action in the role, but the faithful design of Cable's costume and general appearance in Deadpool 2 certainly bodes well. Still, one can't help but wonder what might've been, had Lang been cast as the time-traveling mercenary instead.
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