As a movie character, Deadpool is all about Easter eggs and in-jokes. He is perpetually breaking the fourth wall and seems to be aware that he is in a movie, just as his comics incarnation seems aware that he is a comic character. That means that he is constantly making jokes to poke fun at the absurd world around him.
It should come as no surprise that Deadpool is a bad influence, too. The director and writers of Deadpool 2 wanted to do their own version of poking fun at the absurdity of the shared X-Men universe. They couldn’t directly break the fourth wall as directly as the old Merc With a Mouth, so they found a new technique: tons and tons of cameos!
The first Deadpool movie was surprisingly concise. It focused on only a handful of characters, and Deadpool himself cracked jokes about the lack of other people in locations like Xavier’s mansion. That’s why it’s so surprising to see that Deadpool 2 has as many (if not more) cameos than its predecessor. In fact, there are more surprise cameos here than we saw in Avengers: Infinity War!
Don’t believe us? You don’t need to steal Xavier’s Cerebro device to - all you have to do is keep scrolling to check out Deadpool 2: 20 Crazy Cameos You Missed!
Brad Pitt
Deadpool 2 is a movie that has a really weird sense of humor. Lots of its humor (and the humor of Deadpool himself) comes from being ironic and self-referential. We figured it was only fitting to kick the cameos list off with something equally ironic: the man behind The Vanisher.
Obviously, it’s a running gag in the movie that because Vanisher’s ability is to turn invisible, no one ever knows if he is really there or not. That all changes when he loses his life, appearing briefly as electricity courses through his body.
Vanisher is only visible onscreen for a brief moment, so it’s easy to overlook who was playing him.
You might expect they would get a relatively unknown actor for such a bit role, but since when has a Deadpool movie ever done the expected thing? Instead, the role was actually played by Brad Pitt!
Why did they get such a big name actor, and why was he game for doing it? As it turns out, Pitt’s appearance is a bit of a meta joke: early on, Brad Pitt was one of the many actors that was rumored to play as Cable in the movie. The role eventually went to Josh Brolin, but Pitt’s appearance lets him tease fans who were excited about the rumor!
Stan Lee
At this point, fans have been conditioned to expect Stan Lee in pretty much every Marvel movie. It’s something that manages to ignore things like studio ownership, as Lee is just as likely to appear in a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie as he is in an X-Men or Deadpool movie.
He had an unexpectedly adult cameo in the previous Deadpool film, appearing as a DJ at the dance club where Deadpool goes to try to find Vanessa. However, fans looking for another cameo that overt in the sequel are going to be disappointed!
This is because Stan “The Man” Lee does not appear in the flesh in this movie. However, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t appear. This is a movie ripe with Easter eggs and jokes in the background of every scene, and in one instance, you can see that Stan Lee has been recreated as a bit of street graffiti.
While this may seem disappointing to movie fans who were expecting something more obvious, akin to his Infinity War cameo, it’s actually really fitting: the creator of comics that we love has now been created as a comic, and so the artist becomes the art. For all you true believers, that’s ‘nuff said!
Matt Damon
Some of the cameos on this list were easy to miss because they were barely onscreen for any real length of time. However, there are some amusing exceptions to this. For instance, some characters are onscreen for several long minutes, but they go unrecognized by the audience. How’s that happen? Chalk it up to makeup and other forms of movie magic.
For instance, did you know that this movie starred none other than Matt Damon? However, he wasn’t doing any Jason Bourne heroics - instead, he was rambling on and on about toilet paper.
That’s right: in the scene where two rednecks are debating toilet paper and Cable appears, the one giving his toilet paper manifesto is none other than Matt Damon.
There’s a lot of fun background behind this scene: the Deadpool 2 writer Rhett Reese has his own toilet paper manifesto that he offered to Ryan Reynolds, and they decided it had to go in the movie. Damon agreed to the hilarious cameo (his second hilarious Marvel cameo, if you managed to miss him in Thor: Ragnarok), and he appears in the credits as Dickie Greenleaf. This was the name of Jude Law’s character in The Talented Mr. Ripley, which was an identity eventually stolen by Matt Damon’s titular character!
Taylor Swift’s cats
If you were to try to track every Easter egg, cameo, and obscure reference in Deadpool 2, you’d probably need an extensive cultural encyclopedia and a whole lot of help - or our list!
For instance, even the most minor things can end up being significant in unexpected ways. Like when we see Deadpool moping around the X-mansion, he’s in decidedly more casual clothes than he normally wears. One of those bits of clothing is a t-shirt with two cute cats on it. You might expect this is just because Deadpool loves cats (actually, he really prefers that old unicorn), but it’s actually a shout out to Taylor Swift.
That’s right: if you look closely at the t-shirt, it has a caption to go with the cute kitties. The caption reads “Olivia and Meredith, Friends Furrrrever.” These are actually the names of Taylor Swift’s cats.
Unless you are a mega fan of Taylor Swift’s life, you probably missed these names and their significance. It’s one of the greatest examples of Deadpool 2 being a film that demands multiple viewings, and even then it’s a certainty that you’ll miss another hilarious Easter egg. Maybe T-Swift can show some love back and record a hit song about Deadpool?
Ryan Reynolds
Look, we know what you’re thinking: how can Ryan Reynolds have a cameo in a movie where he’s the star? And how could anybody actually miss Reynolds when he is on a giant screen in front of us for just about every scene? However, Deadpool 2 is a movie where Ryan Reynolds played multiple roles, and all of them are pretty easy to miss if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
Let’s start with the end credits sequence! Despite years of conditioning, some folks still bail on these movies after the credits roll. If that happens, you’ll miss one of the funniest bits: Negasonic and Yukio repair the time travel device, and Deadpool goes back to save Vanessa and Pete. He also manages to destroy himself in some new ways: he shoots the terrible version of Deadpool he played in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and even takes out Ryan Reynolds while he is looking at the Green Lantern script.
If the end credits don't have Ryan Reynolds cameos, he even voices Juggernaut, though his voice is obviously modulated very low.
The credits try to keep this a secret, though, by listing Juggernaut’s voice as “himself.” If you came to this movie for Ryan Reynolds, you definitely got your money’s worth!
Quicksilver
One of the best gags from the first Deadpool was our hero commenting on the relative lack of X-Men in the mansion. He wonders why he only ever sees Negasonic Teenage Warhead and Colossus, and then he breaks the fourth wall by speculating that the studio was too cheap to pay for more than two minor X-Men.
That gag continues into the sequel: while Yukio is now hanging around the house, it’s still suspiciously empty - right up until it isn’t! This leads to arguably the best visual gag in the entire movie.
As Deadpool rants once again about the house being empty, we see an open door with many of the X-Men inside. This includes the scene-stealing Quicksilver, whose ability to save the day while listening to awesome tunes was the highlight of both X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse. Like most of the other X-Men that pop up in this movie, he doesn’t really get a lot to do: he just stares out of the open door until Beast quietly closes it.
Still, it was a welcome glimpse of one of our favorite characters, and we’re already excited to see what he can do in the next movie!
Nathaniel Essex aka Mister Sinister
After audiences left Deadpool 2, they were hungry to scour the internet and find out about both the Easter eggs in the movie as well as the cameos (hey, that’s why you’re here, right?). Every now and then, though, an Easter egg and a cameo are one and the same. That’s the case when it comes to the Essex House for Mutant Rehabilitation.
Despite the name, it’s actually a house that seems to torment mutants and attempt to control them: Domino survived and escaped, and Russell comes back determined to burn the place down and take out his old heaster.
While it may just be a fun Easter egg, the name of the place is evocative of a famous X-Men villain named Mister Sinister. When he’s not going by the most obvious name ever, Mister Sinister often goes by the name Nathaniel Essex. To top things off, the Nathaniel Essex of the comics ran a creepy orphanage where he experimented on Cyclops when he was young. Essex became obsessed with Cyclops’ DNA and ended up cloning Jean Grey so she and Cyclops could produce a perfect mutant for his “sinister” purposes. Who was that mutant? Why, it was Cable, of course!
Cyclops
Speaking of Cyclops, he manages to sneak into Deadpool 2 as well. Like the rest of the core X-Men in the movie, he is visible behind a single door in the X-Mansion when Deadpool is wheeling around and ironically complaining about the lack of X-Men inside.
While most of the X-Men in this movie are just fun appearances, it’s very fitting for Cyclops to be in it: the movie glosses over Cable’s origin, but in the comics, he is the son of Cyclops and a Jean Grey clone named Madelyne Pryor.
When Cable (then known as Nathaniel Summers) is infected by a Techno Organic virus, they send him to the future where he can be healed. Perhaps wisely, this movie does not seem to care about the extraordinarily convoluted backstory connecting Cyclops and Cable.
Nonetheless, it’s fun to see Cyclops in this film, as part of the fun of X-Men: Apocalypse was seeing him as a young mutant who is learning to control and even enjoy his new power. It also marks the second time Cyclops actor Tye Sheridan has been in a recent blockbuster, as he was the star of Ready Player One (where, rather hilariously, his face was obscured with a Cyclops-like VR visor most of the time).
Alan Tudyk
Alan Tudyk is an amazing and prolific actor. In fact, he’s been in so many things that he’s amassed a true “that guy status”: while not everyone re his specific name, almost everyone can at least one role he has had - especially if you count all of his voice-acting credits and motion-capture work.
He pops up again in this movie as one of the two rednecks that Cable encounters when he travels to the past.
Tudyk is the one opposite Matt Damon’s character, so he’s on the receiving end of the infamous “toilet paper manifesto” that the other character is laying out.
Even though they don’t share any scenes together, this movie ended up being something of an ersatz Firefly reunion. While he may be known for many different roles, Alan Tudyk will always be a specific character to sci-fi fans: he was Wash on the beloved cult hit Firefly. Vanessa's actor Morena Baccarin also played in that show as the Companion named Inara. Firefly managed to get a single movie, Serenity, to wrap things up, but after that, it’s rare to see a movie with both Tudyk and Baccarin in it, so this was a real treat!
Nightcrawler
Even the most casual fans of the X-Men movies know that their universe has been rocked by time travel. This created a kind of ripple affect that altered or undid much of what we had seen before. Such changes affected certain characters more than others.
For instance, Nightcrawler: we had previously seen his first meeting with the X-Men back in X-2, when he was an adult who was in full control of his powers. Thanks to the timey-wimey events that started in Days of Future Past, Nightcrawler ends up meeting the X-Men as a teenager, as seen in X-Men: Apocalypse.
Like many of the other X-Men, he pops up in that one brief scene in Deadpool 2. Along with characters like Cyclops and Quicksilver, he is behind an open door that Deadpool doesn’t see as he rants about the lack of X-Men. The scene goes by so quick that it’s easy to miss it entirely, and even for those who did see it, it is difficult to what of the X-Men were present. Nightcrawler, though, is nice and distinctive, and he should stand out very easily if you try to notice him the next time you watch the movie!
