Doctor Strange 2 Writer Talks Casting The Illuminati, Tom Cruise, And More

“The final lineup in that group is beyond my wildest dreams of who we could get — and then dispatch. I never dreamed we’d be able to do that. But the lineup is close to, I think, who was originally in my first draft, which was: ‘Okay, I know it can’t actually be this.’ And then it ended up being close to that. It was just a moving target of who’s available and who’s right. It became, ‘All right, if you’re putting together an Illuminati, who would actually need to be in it?’ You’d have people with certain power sets. And we tried to be true to what kind of characters were represented in the Illuminati in the comics.”

MICHAEL WALDRON

“Yeah, that was totally made up. I mean, there’s no cut footage of Tom Cruise!  But I love Tom Cruise, and I said to [Marvel Studios president] Kevin [Feige]  at one point, I was like, Could we get Tom Cruise’s Iron Man? I remember reading about that in Ain’t It Cool News back in the day, that Tom Cruise was going to be Iron Man……As it was being talked about online, I was like, Yeah, that’d be cool!”

MICHAEL WALDRON

“Yeah, let me know! I guess it begs the question, What did Quentin know? He was a smart guy. Um, is it just a coincidence? That’s… I don’t know. But what’s your out?”

MICHAEL WALDRON

“There you go!”

MICHAEL WALDRON

“I felt like we had a happy ending. We were like, like, ‘Gee, you know, for a movie where a lot of bad shit happens, we got kind of a happy ending here.’ We really wrapped it up and that didn’t quite seem right. We kept thinking about what Mordo warned Strange in the first movie: ‘The bill comes due.’ It’s like Wong says, ‘You possessed your own corpse.’ Like, is this guy ever going to face any consequences? And it just felt like a great nod to horror movies where there’s that final twist.”

MICHAEL WALDRON

“Well, we had the great face-off with Sinister Strange, and so much of that was driven by Benedict really making that sing. I remember, for our third act we were always kind of stuck over just how Strange was going to get back for this final conflict. [When we were] in London as we were prepping, it never felt like we quite had the answer. One day I was sitting with Richie Palmer, our producer, and we’re like, he’s got to dreamwalk. He’s got the Darkhold; it’s got to be dreamwalking. We literally asked ourselves, but who is he going to dreamwalk into? There’s gotta be a body. And we both had the lightbulb moment at the same time: There is a dead Strange from that opening that can come through the portal with America! I quickly typed up a pitch and put it out there.