Robert Downey Jr was offered a cameo in Deadpool and Wolverine but turned it down.

The film’s writers, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick revealed in an interview with IndieWire  that they attempted to have Downey Jr return to the Marvel franchise to cameo as Tony Stark/Iron Man.

It was later announced that he would be making a surprise return to the franchise to play Dr Doom, one of its biggest villains, in the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday. Reese and Wernick were unaware that this was in the pipeline.

The scene they wanted Downey Jr was near the beginning of the film. Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) used Cable’s time machine to jump over to The Sacred Timeline in order to try and become one of the Avengers. Deadpool has a meeting with Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), who rejects him because he is too self-centered for the Avengers. The writers wanted Downey Jr in the room for that scene, but kept it as it still worked without him.

“Ryan Reynolds wrote the scene with both of them, so in the hopes we could get Downey,” Reese said. “But he also wanted Favreau, because they’re a great combo, and they were all in the scene together.”

“Behind the scenes, we didn’t know about the Doctor Doom,” added Wernick. “And there’s no way he was going to do both. And then we said, ‘Oh, Downey doesn’t say no to Ryan Reynolds, does he? No one says no to Ryan Reynolds.’ And Ryan gave him the hard press. We wrote scenes, and Downey read the scenes, but what we didn’t know behind the scenes was this Doctor Doom thing.”

“I mean, look, we would’ve loved to have Downey,” Reese said. “But, at the same time, I think Marvel had this ace in their hole, which is he’s about to come back in this different character. So, to have him be Tony Stark? Knowing that Doctor Doom was coming on the heels of that? It just didn’t make sense.”

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At one point, the writers toyed with the idea of getting all of the Avengers in the room, which would later involve Deadpool “[dressing] all the Avengers down in a way only Deadpool could do.”.

“He was going to get mad and basically attack each one of them in a vicious kind of way,” added Reese.

The idea was also floated that Rob Delaney’s Peter would be in the room with Deadpool, which would lead to the joke of Deadpool not being able to pick up Thor’s hammer but Peter being able to do it with ease.

“Peter casually picked up Thor’s Hammer in the background,” Reese said. “That was the joke. Originally, Peter accompanied him there. There were never screenplay pages, but it was the idea of the scene. I remember pitching that he was going to try to get Captain America to swear. I don’t really remember too much else in terms of the details, but yeah, he was going to dress them down to be sure.”

In a three-star review of Deadpool & Wolverine, NME wrote: “Despite the A-list distractions (no spoilers here), Deadpool & Wolverine is really all about Reynolds and Jackman. In fact, it’s really all about Reynolds – with Jackman doing a heroic job of playing the surly straight man trying to keep up with Reynolds’ sweary killer clown. The first two Deadpool films were funny and violent and original, but this one shows Marvel’s most gloriously inappropriate superhero at his very best and worst.”