“X-Men” star Aaron Stanford sparks up Pyro again after 18 years: 'I was shocked and thrilled' (exclusive)

The actor, last seen as the fire-wielding mutant in 2006's "X-Men: The Last Stand," opens up about his "Deadpool & Wolverine" return.

Aside from Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, most other actors appearing in Deadpool & Wolverine can't even acknowledge their presence in the film, let alone talk about their roles generally. That puts Aaron Stanford in a unique position.

"Is that true? Is everyone else still completely hidden?" he asks while speaking with Entertainment Weekly recently.

In truth, everyone else hasn't been completely hidden. Tyler Mane's Sabretooth, last seen in 2000's X-Men, got a shoutout in a recent teaser for the highly secretive Marvel movie. Previous reveals also strongly hinted at the re-emergence of Toad (played by Ray Park in X-Men), Lady Deathstrike (played by Kelly Hu in 2003's X2: X-Men United), and Azazel (played by Jason Flemyng in 2011's X-Men: First Class), three other characters from days of X-Men movies past. Then, of course, there are the paparazzi photos that leaked from set and sent the internet rumor mill ablaze.

Related: How the cameo-stacked Deadpool & Wolverine carves out a new future for Marvel's mutants

Stanford, however, can actually talk about his return. Fans have known about his comeback since the first Deadpool & Wolverine trailer came out during the Super Bowl, revealing the official first look at his Pyro, the fire-manipulating mutant he played across X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). "I was shocked and thrilled," Stanford says of getting the call to reprise the role again after 18 years.

The actor, also known for Syfy series 12 Monkeys and horror film The Hills Have Eyes, knew "something was percolating for a while" after his agent received a series of phone calls from Disney's Marvel Studios. "They wanted to know what my availability was, but they wouldn't say what it was in regards to," Stanford recalls. "Then there was another phone call and another phone call and just more and more inquiries." He finally put it all together when Marvel asked to connect him with Shawn Levy, the director of the third Deadpool movie. "He said, 'Yeah, you guessed correctly. We want to bring Pyro back after 20 years,'" Stanford says.

The 47-year-old Massachusetts-born Los Angeleno has vivid memories of auditioning for Pyro, a.k.a. John Allerdyce, for X2, which he considers to be "one of the first comic book films that was taken seriously and considered elevated." Alex Burton appeared briefly as the character in the first X-Men, but John would take a larger role in the sequel. "I thought I had absolutely no chance at it, and so I didn't take it as seriously as maybe I would've, which is probably the reason that I got it," Stanford says.

Related: Deadpool & Wolverine director teases cameos: 'There's a lot of characters'

The sides for the audition only had a few lines, but they were from what is now Stanford's most memorable scene from the film. With Bobby (Shawn Ashmore), Rogue (Anna Paquin), and John pinned down by cops and Logan (Jackman) seemingly dead, Pyro goes into attack mode, saying, "You know all those dangerous mutants you hear about on the news? I'm the worst one."

"That was the whole audition. That was it," Stanford says. "What they were doing was saying, 'Okay, we know there's not a lot to work with here, so do what you will. Go ahead and improv." He began hurling imaginary fireballs around the room. "What came to me was, I'm blowing up all these cops, so maybe I'm taunting them," the actor continues. "I started singing the theme song to Cops. 'Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?'" Stanford left humiliated but it was that flair that got him the job.

Actually filming his audition scene on set was a different matter entirely. Stanford was used to low-budget indie films at the time, not million-dollar pyrotechnics that involved blowing up cars. "I noticed that everybody besides me suddenly took 10 steps backwards, and all these plexiglass blast shields got raised up to protect everybody from potential shrapnel," he remembers of the day. "I was the only one standing in the foreground just completely in the path of this blast. So suddenly it didn't seem quite as fun anymore. Everything was okay, but there were a few moments of doubt there for sure."

Related: Watch Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman recap the Deadpool movies — and their X-Men Origins

Stanford figured his days playing the mutant had snuffed out long ago after playing him again in X-Men: The Last Stand. That film, one of the most poorly received entries of the franchise, effectively capped the first era of the live-action X-Men on screen before the movies shifted to prequels. Stanford briefly thought he would make a comeback with 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past, a time-travel film that brought together OG stars of the franchise, such as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, with the actors of the prequel films, like Stewart and McKellen's counterparts, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender.

"For whatever reason it didn't happen," Stanford says. "I think they made reference to Pyro being dead in the movies or something like that, so I got a nod out of it. I essentially just assumed that was it. I had done those movies, a lot of time had passed, and they were cherished memories. I didn't believe that Pyro would be making any more appearances."

But not only is Pyro back years later, he actually has a comic book-accurate costume, inspired by the Ultimate X-Men run from Marvel Comics. "In the original X-Men films, Pyro gets really shortchanged in terms of a costume," Stanford remarks. "In X2, we start off with Pyro in Xavier's School for Gifted Mutants. The SWAT team bursts in in the middle of the night and we have to flee. So for half the movie, I'm in my jammies. I never got the cool leather, tactical suit that all the X-Men wear. And in X3, I was just dressed in an ensemble from Hot Topic, basically. So to have him be in a proper superhero costume that was actually taken from the comics themselves was very cool."

Related: Emma Corrin goes inside the mind of Deadpool & Wolverine villain Cassandra Nova (exclusive)

The cast and crew heavily guard the story details for Deadpool & Wolverine, but we know Pyro shows up in a wasteland environment as Reynolds' Wade Wilson and Jackman's Logan hop about the multiverse. The titular pair encounter the literal fire cracker among a group of mutants who follow Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), a powerful psychic and a crucial adversary to Deadpool and Wolverine. The wasteland includes the remains of a destroyed 20th Century Fox logo (one of multiple self-referential nods to the previous Hollywood studio that owned the X-Men movie rights), and there's a hollowed-out giant Ant-Man corpse that serves as Cassandra's lair.

"The very first set I saw was this just gigantic desert wasteland with all of these practical set pieces that stretched the length of a football field," Stanford recalls. "I would certainly have expected something like that to be all green screen, but the pains that were taken and the amount of resources and labor that had to go into physically building this world just absolutely astonished me."

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Mad Max was a clear reference for this particular setting. Pyro even gets his own car. "It's this gigantic stretch hot rod," he says. "They built that thing and we raced it across the desert. I'm sitting there strapped into a pilot's chair behind a minigun. The very first time that we raced across the expanse, one of the exhaust pipes broke off the front of it. You heard this tremendous racket explosion. As it fell, it dropped under the car and probably almost busted an axle. So, yeah, that was an exciting little first run in that car."

All the other details will have to wait until Deadpool & Wolverine opens in theaters July 26. Stanford won't even confirm whether his signature Pyro lighter — the one with the shark design — comes along for this ride. "They're a really tight bunch," he says of Marvel. "I'm so paranoid."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.