For some, the news that Hugh Jackman would play Wolverine one more time was the most exciting announcement surrounding Deadpool & Wolverine. But, for others, and for me, personally, another confirmed 20th Century Fox X-Men movie cameo caused even more delight. In the very first trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine, Marvel Studios teased that Aaron Stanford’s Pyro would return to our screens in the MCU movie. For context, Stanford last played Pyro nearly two decades ago in X-Men: The Last Stand. And so, for Pyro fans, the idea that Stanford’s Pyro might someday be back seemed increasingly like an impossible dream. Stanford shares with Nerdist, that he, himself, had had no inclination that his Pyro would ever return until the Deadpool & Wolverine whispers started bubbling up. But to the great happiness of all, it’s happening!
To celebrate this cameo, explore Pyro through the ages, and tease more about what we might expect from the character in Deadpool & Wolverine, Aaron Stanford sat down with Nerdist for a chat. You can watch what Stanford had to say about Pyro in our video or read the full interview text below if that’s what you prefer.
Aaron Stanford on Pyro in Deadpool & Wolverine: The Multiverse, Marvel Comics Influence, and More
Nerdist: I wanted to kick off talking about more recent Pyro in Deadpool & Wolverine. It’s been 18 years since you last played Pyro; did you ever imagine your Pyro would come back in a Marvel movie? Did you ever discuss it before Deadpool & Wolverine?
Aaron Stanford: No, absolutely not. I thought that was very much the end of Pyro, X3, where he receives an icy headbutt from Iceman and gets knocked out, and that’s the end of him, which personally, I found to be a very unsatisfying ending for Pyro. But no, there had never been any discussion of him coming back. Maybe for a brief moment, I think I thought maybe they’d bring him back for Days of Future Past, where I had heard that they brought back some friends of mine from the old movies. But it just didn’t happen. It didn’t really pan out, and I had made my peace with that, honestly.
Then, yeah, there just started being little whispers and phone calls made to my agent, like “The MCU is checking your availability,” and “We don’t know what it’s for,” and, “Maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that, who knows?” And excitement was bubbling up. And, finally, a phone call with Shawn Levy where he said, “Yes indeed, what you suspect is the case, and we would like to bring Pyro back for Deadpool & Wolverine,” So yeah, I was pretty pumped.
That’s very exciting for all the Pyro fans out there, which I think there are many. So, is Deadpool & Wolverine‘s Pyro the same Pyro as the Pyro we saw before, or is it a different sort of fella?
Stanford: It is. I mean, it’s the same Pyro, who’s obviously been through a lot. It’s an older version of Pyro. It’s me, it’s Pyro at my age. There’s no special effects makeup putting us back to that time period or anything.
But is Deadpool & Wolverine‘s Pyro directly a continuation of X2/3’s Pyro, or is he from a different universe?
Stanford: First of all, I can’t get too into the specifics. It’s for your own protection and so the movie isn’t ruined for you. But I know, but I have seen already in interviews, people are talking about some multiverse stuff in there. So there’s a bit of that. And with the Pyro character, I think you’re not a hundred percent certain which universe he’s from, but he’s certainly clearly an extension of the Pyro that we already know from the two X-Men films, X2 and X3.
Makes sense! And so, is this Pyro pulling from Marvel’s comics at all? I know that the movie version was a bit of its own thing, but this time around, in Deadpool & Wolverine, is Marvel pulling from any specific Pyro stories?
Stanford: They are. For the costume in particular, they took from, I think it’s called Ultimate X-Men, I think it’s the Pyro in the Ultimate series, where he has a very specific look, and they replicated the costume that version of Pyro has. But not the rest of him because that version of Pyro is really interesting. He’s a madman, and he’s horribly burned over his entire body from all the fire that he’s been playing with for his entire life. But yeah, so I think they drew upon that.
So it’s sort of an amalgam of the look from that run from that universe and then what they created for the X-Men movies. And you’re correct; those were a bit different from the original comics. Not only he’s a full grown adult, but he’s Australian, and he is, of all things, a gothic romance novelist, which is absolutely fascinating. And I wish they had delved into that at some point.
I feel Pyro could still be a gothic romance novelist. I think we need a “Pyro writes gothic romances” series on Disney+
Stanford: Let’s make it happen.
But if not that, do you think there’s a shot Pyro could be back from more in the MCU, or is this more of a one-and-done return?
Stanford: I think anything’s possible. As we discussed, I thought Pyro was long gone, so there’s always a chance. I have no idea what they have planned for the future. They play their hand pretty close to the vest. They don’t let on, they don’t tell you a lot. So I have no idea. But yes, certainly anything’s possible.
And if you were ever to come back and play a different hero in the MCU, is there anyone you might want to try on for size, or is it all Pyro, all the way?
Stanford: That’s a good question. Yeah, I hadn’t considered it. I’m obviously very invested in Pyro. I’ve been doing it for a long time. I don’t know. There are other characters I’d be interested in playing. I think I’d be horribly miscast, but I’m a pretty big fan of The Punisher, and I don’t think I quite fit that role. What do you think?
You know, what? I personally want to see that MCU Pyro gothic romance writer Disney+ series come to life.
Stanford: I found my niche.
Aaron Stanford Looks Back on Pyro in X2: X-Men United and X-Men: The Last Stand
Pyro’s Backstory
So, let’s look back a little at X2’s Pyro. One of my favorite scenes in the entire movie is when we see Pyro sort of looking back at his reflection in Bobby’s family picture. It really creates this vision of very stark loneliness, especially juxtaposed with Rogue and Bobby kind of canoodling upstairs. I think that really defined the character. Did that moment feel like it carried a lot of weight from your perspective?
Stanford: Yeah, I absolutely love that you’re familiar with that moment and that you brought it up because it’s a small moment in the film, but to me, it was enormous. Because, to me, that little moment, like that Pyro is staring at a picture on the mantle of somebody else’s happy family, and he’s clutching his lighter close to him like a security blanket almost. And just that one little moment lets you know so much about him. Like that this character who sort of comes off like a jerk in the early scenes, he’s very arrogant, he’s very brash, and you see where that’s coming from, and it’s coming from a place of pain. And obviously, what’s suggested at that moment is that this is a kid didn’t have a family like that. He didn’t have an experience like that.
I think Pyro is very much, he’s an outsider among outsiders. He goes to Professor X’s school for gifted mutants, and I think a lot of the other students there, they finally found their place where they fit. But for Pyro, it’s just yet another place that he didn’t quite fit in. And I think there’s a real loneliness there. I think there’s pain there. And that’s what the Magneto character capitalizes on in the other really great, small but great moment, where they’re sitting next to each other, and Magneto holds out the lighter to Pyro and makes that connection with him.
And you can see that there’s already a bond forming and that maybe Magneto is sort of going to become a father figure that Pyro really desperately needs. So yeah, X2 was my favorite because it did have all those little moments that really, even within this gigantic huge action film, there did exist this little, very, very, poignant little character arc for Pyro that was just done very, very elegantly.
I worried so much at the time that people would just think Pyro was a jerk. But he’s a complicated man. He was a complicated kid at the time. But yeah, I think people were able to see through some of the arrogance and some of the brashness to the wounded soul beneath that he was. The two writers were Mike Dougherty and Dan Harris, and they just did a really, really beautiful job with small, tiny moments hinting at just an ocean of depth.
I think so, too. Did you ever, with them or by yourself, construct a more specific backstory for Pyro that we didn’t get to see on screen? Or did it just remain in those intimations?
Stanford: I didn’t try to interject or impose myself into whatever they had planned or whatever they were writing because I read what they were writing, and it was good, and I dug it, and I didn’t want to mess around with it or change it in any way. So I read what they wrote. I didn’t ask them what they had in mind for the subtext or what was behind it, and just sort of came up with my own backstory that fit with these, again, these little elegant vignettes where they were hinting at what was going on with Pyro and just built that story in my own head and let that give some depth to the performance.
And were you pulling all from Marvel Comics at that point when you were creating X2 Pyro?
Stanford: I really wasn’t because at that stage, all the source material they gave me, it was real old school stuff, and the stuff that I read, anyway, the stuff that I was aware of, that was on my radar, it didn’t have a lot of that backstory. Again, it did have that interesting, weird, he’s a romance novelist stuff, which was just like, I was like, wow, that’s not what I expected. But no, there definitely was a break from the comics.
And I think that was, again, because they wanted to tell this story that took place in this school and the small grouping of Rogue, Iceman, and Pyro; they really wanted to tell it from a younger perspective. And that younger version of Pyro didn’t exist in the comics, so a lot of it had to sort of be made up.
The Meaning of Pyro’s Story
That makes a lot of sense. So as a queer person, time and age have made Pyro’s journey in those early X-Men movies feel especially resonant because he kind of refuses to deny who he is and won’t countenance anybody who hates him for his otherness. And he doesn’t want to just fit in. He wants to be glorious, and he really accepts himself. That’s really a beautiful and powerful narrative. Is that something that occurred to you while you were creating Pyro or that you’ve thought about since?
Stanford: Well, first of all, I love the interpretation. It’s absolutely fantastic. And all of those themes were, to me, crystal clear within that movie. There’s the very, very famous moment where Iceman’s parents ask him if he’s ever considered not being a mutant. And the parallel there is very, very obvious for me. I hadn’t made a specific choice in that direction, but that interpretation is very, very easy for me to see. And again, that stuff, it was all baked into the story in general, for sure.
Aaron Stanford on working with Ian McKellen and Pyro and Magneto
Amazing. And you mentioned a little, that moment with Magneto. What was it like filming with Ian McKellen and how did you imagine Magneto and Pyro’s relationship? I really loved when he said, “You are a God among insects…”
Stanford: God among insects. That’s great. Yeah. So that’s hard to resist, isn’t it?
Very.
Stanford: Yeah, working with him was, I mean, the whole experience was, it was very surreal to me. I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, which is pretty much as far from Hollywood as you can get. And I had this dream of being an actor and being a professional actor. And I moved to New York City and believed that I would probably be doing small off-Broadway theater forever.
To end up finding myself in this world and finding myself working opposite somebody like Ian McKellen, who I had, I remember I had an old VHS cassette of, he had done a version of Richard II, which was set in World War II and it was just such a magnum opus. He gave such a commanding for performance. He’s just such an actor’s actor and so iconic. So, finding yourself in a scene coming from where I was coming from, suddenly you’re looking Ian McKellen in the face and doing a scene with him. The whole thing is, it’s almost disassociative. It’s, it’s like a break from reality. So it was just tremendous. The whole thing was incredible.
And as I said, I think just in terms of the character relationship, I think Pyro looks at Magneto, and he sees a lot of himself in this man who’s absolutely refused to bow down and refused to accept the abuse that was heaped on him. I think Pyro had a lot of abuse in his life, and I think Magneto had a lot of abuse in his life. And the direction they went in, it was the direction of the extremist who just decides, “I have been hurt. I want to hurt the people who hurt me.” It’s very simple, it very seductive way of looking at things. And I think Pyro very much was he gets seduced by magneto and brought into that fold.
Will We Ever See a Pyro vs. Iceman Rematch?
Absolutely. Okay, so we’re at the end of our time, so I’ll just sneak in one final question. We touched a little bit about that final fight with Pyro and Bobby, and it kind of felt maybe a bit… I had really been looking forward to it in the lead up to X3 and then it felt kind of very concise, sort of aborted. Was there ever any more planned between them, and do you think maybe we’ll see a Pyro vs. Iceman rematch in Deadpool & Wolverine or something?
Stanford: That would certainly be a lot of fun. I’m good friends with Shawn Ashmore, so I would love nothing more to get back into it than to get back into it with him. But yes, look, I agree with you. I was like, “Nope, it’s not enough.” As to whether or not there had been more planned at some point between Iceman and Pyro, I honestly have no idea. But yeah, I’ll be totally honest. It wasn’t the way I was hoping to go out and now I didn’t.
Now you didn’t!
Stanford: We have this extension, so everything worked out.
Well, hopefully, in the Pyro gothic romance MCU miniseries, Iceman and Pyro can have yet another rematch, and Pyro can come out on top this time around. But, thank you so much! This is an amazing conversation I feel was worth waiting almost 20 years to have. I’m glad we are a simpatico on Pyro.
Stanford: Me too. I’m so glad you’re a Pyro scholar; I would never have expected that. So, thank you for caring. I appreciate it.
Rotem Rusak is the Editor-in-Chief of Nerdist. She’s what you might call an aficionado of antiheroes with tragic backstories and has been a scholar of Aaron Stanford’s Pyro since 2005.
