10 Insane Reasons Actors Didn’t Return for Sequels

The roster of the team changed drastically throughout Fox's X-Men franchise, with plenty of different names and faces coming and going from film to film. Very few mutants stuck around from start to finish, but equally, there weren't too many that had a hand in just a single chapter of the story.

One such character was Alan Cumming's Nightcrawler. While Kodi Smit-McPhee may have brought the character to life in the X-Men: Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix, Cumming portrayed Kurt Wagner in just X2, never to be seen again.

Ironically, Nightcrawler was one of the most interesting parts of one of the best X-Men movies ever, but the actor decided himself against returning for X-Men: The Last Stand three years later, and it all had to do with the time in the make-up chair.

Reportedly, this process took four hours to create, thanks to it being achieved purely with practical effects, something that the actor was not prepared to do for what would have been a diminished role in the sequel. Famously, Jennifer Lawrence hated the eight-hour sessions she had to go through to become Raven in her early X-Men career, but unlike Cumming she stuck around in spite of this. Admittedly, Mystique's look became noticeably less detailed as the franchise went on, perhaps something similar could have been worked out for Nightcrawler.