Reprising his role as Nightcrawler in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday, Cumming said he was happy to overwrite the memories on the set of the 2003 X2, where the cast reportedly threatened to leave the set due to difficulties with director Bryan Singer.
The US Traitors host has previously spoken about his “hellish” time on the production, which saw him spend five hours in the makeup chair on several occasions, but explained in an interview with Deadline News why he jumped at the chance to revisit the character.
“There were things that happened on the [X2] set that were just shocking to me,” Cumming said.
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“The working environment was very, very wrong and very just unacceptable. And we all have talked about it in various ways over the years.
“Going back to it after all these years was great because I really liked the character, and so to go back and play him now and also this film is like superhero soup. There’s so many of them in it. I just can’t keep up.”
Cumming also told People last week that filming Doomsday was not only “amazing” in an “ooey, gooey way”, but that it was “really healing and really nice to go back to something that was a terrible experience when I did it the first time”.
Alan Cumming on Hollywood Boulevard (Image: (Photo by JC Olivera/Getty Images)
The returning Doomsday cast is set to include the likes of Anthony Mackie, Danny Ramirez, Paul Rudd, Tom Hiddleston and Simu Liu.
Along with Cumming returning to the franchise, Rebecca Romijn, who played Mystique in the original trilogy and Kelsey Grammer, who portrayed Dr Henry “Hank” McCoy, also known as Beast.
Avengers: Doomsday is due to hit cinemas in December this year.
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It comes after the Scottish actor criticised the “bad leadership” behind the Bafta film awards, and said he would not want to host the event again after the BBC failed to censor an involuntary tick by tourette’s campaigner John Davidson during the broadcast, which was on a two-hour time delay.
Davidson has since said he was “deeply mortified” by the incident, with Cumming, who hosted the ceremony, describing it as an “international scandal”.
The 61-year-old said: “It was bad, bad, bad, bad leadership. Bad people who weren’t doing their jobs properly, who really had not prepared and let people down.”
Cumming said he had not been warned about the possibility of Davidson having an offensive outburst as a result of his Tourette’s.
He said: “They just said, ‘There’ll be noise’. You could say they didn’t know, but they clearly did, because apparently John had said the n-word at a party the day before.
“They were thinking of shouting at me during the dress rehearsal to see what I’d do, but they didn’t.”