Avengers: Endgame featured a crazy number of important characters and it would have no doubt been pretty difficult to get everyone together to shoot the movie, but it turns out there’s one scene featuring three cameos that almost didn’t happen.
Anthony Russo, who co-directed the movie with his brother Joe Russo, has revealed the most difficult cameo to shoot for the movie involved his extended family.
In an interview with Cleveland.com, Russo said, “The hardest one was a scene in the movie where it’s the scene in the diner where we introduced Smart Hulk the first time.
“So, he’s sitting there with Ant-Man, Black Widow and Captain America, and there’s these three kids that walk in who are fans of Hulk. They want a picture with him.
“And those three kids are, one is my son Julian. One is my brother’s daughter, Lia. One is my sister’s son, Augie.”
It turns out that school schedules, of all things, made things very difficult to get all three of the kids together to shoot their very quick scene.
The other reason the Hulk scene was somewhat difficult, was that it was a new scene added as part of reshoots.
In the commentary featured on the movie’s Blu-ray, the Russo brothers said that the merging of Bruce Banner and the Hulk was meant to happen at the end of Avengers: Infinity War, but when they edited the scene they thought it didn’t fit very well with the movie’s depressing finish.
They then had to scramble to add the scene into Endgame to explain the Hulk’s transformation.
The three kids aren’t the only members of the Russo family to appear in the film. Joe’s daughter Ava played Lila Burton, the daughter of Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye who gets dusted while learning archery at the beginning of the film.
Joe also made a cameo as the man in the support group with Captain America who tells a story of going on a date with another man after losing loved ones in the Snap five years earlier.
Who’d have thought getting Tilda Swinton and Robert Redford to appear in the movie would be easier than getting three kids out of school?
The easiest cameo to make happen for the movie was likely Natalie Portman, as her scenes were made possible using old footage from Thor: The Dark World. She did, however, do some extra voice work.