Stan Lee’s Guardians Of The Galaxy 3 Cameo Would Have Been A High Evolutionary Experiment

According to the commentary, James Gunn knew Stan Lee was getting older and wanted to give him an easy cameo:

“I originally wrote Lambshank, the character that I played, for Stan Lee. […] I knew he was also getting much older, and it’d be harder to bring him to Atlanta to shoot, so I did a character that I could just animate and then have him do the voice and have a little Stan Lee-like face on that character. But unfortunately, Stan passed, who I really enjoyed working with and directing so many times through these movies.”

That character? It was Lambshank, one of the High Evolutionary’s (Chukwudi Iwuji) hybrid creations. If you recall, late in the film, Mantis (Pom Klementieff) is horrified by the twisted creature but tries to tell him it’s because he looks so cool. Lee would have been able to record the cameo from somewhere else. Gunn ended up doing the role instead.

On a personal note, I used to co-host a web series called “Cocktails with Stan” where he and I would interview celebrities. One thing Stan always spoke about was how much he loved doing cameos. I joked about doing a historical film once backstage once, and he immediately said, “Ooh, what cameo can I do?” He was so excited about his cameo in the TV series “Agent Carter” that he broke the news to me and told me to write it up at the time. He would have loved this one.

To that end, his company Pow! Entertainment made a deal with Marvel, so his likeness and voice can be used (via THR) in future TV and film projects that work with “who he was.” He would have loved that as well, I think.

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