Here's why comic villain Omega Red's cameo was cut from Deadpool 2, and who played him. The X-Men movie franchise is something of a milestone in the comic book movie genre, with the success of 2000's X-Men helping kick off the comic adaptation craze that followed. Of course, the quality of the main series and its various spinoffs varied wildly over the years, with the likes of X-Men: The Last Stand being considered duds while 2017's Logan was greeted with critical acclaim.
The X-Men movie series was also PG-13, audience-friendly fare - which makes it all the more surprising that the spinoff Deadpool movies are the highest-grossing of the series. Ryan Reynolds famously spent a decade trying to mount a Deadpool movie, including agreeing to an infamously badly handled cameo for the character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He finally got his solo Deadpool movie to the screen in 2016, where it became a runaway success despite its hard R rating.
Reynolds soon suited up again for 2018's Deadpool 2, which put its larger budget to good effect and featured some other famous comic book characters, ranging from Josh Brolin's Cable to Juggernaut - played by an uncredited Reynolds. Around the midway point of Deadpool 2, Wade/Deadpool finds himself locked up inside of a special prison dubbed the "Ice Box," which holds any number of dangerous mutants. Only the eagle-eyed will be able to spot recurring X-Men villain Omega Red (AKA Arkady Rossovich) in the background, but why was the villain's cameo largely cut?
NFL player Dakoda Shepley portrayed the villain, with Omega Red's Deadpool 2 cameo seeing the character playing chess. Deadpool 2's script never featured a scene for Omega Red, and he was later added to the sequel to populate the prison and give it a sense of being part of a much larger world. The Omega Red Deadpool 2 cameo itself was always fairly minor, however, and it was easily taken out.
Omega Red might actually make a great villain for a future Deadpool movie, with the super-soldier famously having metal tentacles that come out of his arms. There was even talk of a solo Omega Red movie while Fox's X-Men franchise was still up and running, but those plans, which involved comic villain Mister Sinister being set up as part of a multi-film arc, were later scrapped. Omega Red's Deadpool 2 cameo may have been essentially snipped out of the sequel, but there's no telling where the character might resurface someday.