One of the most important villains in the Marvel Cinematic Universe was recast a very long time ago, and it seems a good chunk of the fanbase was completely unaware they’d even been replaced.
A whole bunch of actors have been swapped out during the 15 years that Disney has been producing Marvel films, including Terrence Howard's War Machine, Edward Norton's Hulk, and Dominic Cooper’s Howard Stark.
Sometimes this is done because a character has to be older or because an actor gets themselves fired. However, in the case of one big villain in the MCU, one actor simply found that trying to reprise his role was too much of a headache.
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As one commenter pointed out in a thread on the r/marvelstudios subreddit, the Red Skull we saw in Avengers: Infinity War wasn’t actually played by Hugo Weaving (who originally played the character in Captain America: The First Avenger).
“Ross Marquand killed it as Red Skull,” commented user Rman823.
“Seeing Infinity War in theaters, I legitimately thought they got Hugo Weaving back. As a Walking Dead fan, it was a nice surprise when I found out it was him. His Ultron is pretty good too, but it’s more obvious it isn’t Spader.”
The funny thing is, Rman823’s comment about not initially realising Hugo Weaving returned still seems to be true for a lot of MCU fans, based on the replies.
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“TIL it wasn’t Hugo Weaving in Infinity War!” commented user frenchwolves.
“Yep, mind blown!!” replied another user.
“Good news the world has a Hugo Weaving replacement!”
So, why exactly did Weaving not end up coming back? Well, it turns out that actually may have been Disney’s fault.
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“Oh, yeah. I loved playing that character Red Skull – it was a lot of fun. We were all obliged to sign up for three pictures: I was thinking [Red Skull] probably wouldn’t come back in ‘Captain America’ but he may well come back as a villain in ‘The Avengers,’... By then, they’d pushed back on the contracts that we agreed on…” Weaving told TimeOut magazine.
“And the promise when we first signed the contracts was that the money would grow each time. They said: ‘It’s just a voice job, it’s not a big deal.’ I actually found negotiating with them through my agent impossible. And I didn’t really wanna do it that much. But I would have done it.”
It’s a shame he never reprised the role, but you gotta admit that Ross Marquand crushed it. Makes me wonder which actor Disney will bring back in the future though, should Red Skull ever return.