Marvel is so secretive that one Avengers star didn't even know he was in the movie until he was on set: "I almost passed out"

Marvel is so secretive sometimes that they even had one Avengers star fooled until he was reading his lines on set.

Red Skull actor Ross Marquand, who took over from Hugo Weaving for the character's brief scenes in Infinity War and Endgame, has revealed that he "almost passed out" when someone told him what he was actually working on.

"I didn't know what movie I was going to work on. They didn't tell me. They quite literally said it was a voice-matching job that may entail voice-matching this character that Hugo [Weaving] played, but they didn't even say that by name," he said during a recent panel appearance at Awesome Con 2025 (via ComicBook.com).

"It wasn't until I got to the set that they made me shave and put the [motion capture] dots on," The Walking Dead actor recalled. "I'm looking around, there's like a 150 people waiting for me. I'm like, 'This is not a regular voiceover job. What is going on?' That's when the makeup artist leaned over, and he said, 'Do you know what you're working on? This is the new Avengers movie.' I'm like, 'Oh, God.' I almost passed out."

The red-skinned Hydra villain Red Skull surprisingly appeared in Infinity War as the keeper of the Soul Stone in the planet Vormir, sharing scenes with Thanos and Gamora, and with Black Widow and Hawkeye in the follow-up Endgame. The character was thought to be dead after being destroyed by the Tesseract in Captain America: The First Avenger.

Back in 2012, Hugo Weaving said he didn't want to play Red Skull again. "I think I’ve done my dash with that sort of film", he said. Marquand was brought in for the Avengers movies to replicate Weaving's voice. It's not the first time he has used that skill in the MCU – he emulated James Spader's voice to play Infinity Ultron in the animated Disney+ series What If…?, and Cedric Smith's as Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men ’97.

Will Marquand's talent for voice replacing be used in the upcoming movies Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars? Even if it is, he might have yet to find out about it.

For more, check our guide to all the upcoming Marvel movies and TV shows, or have a marathon with our rundown of how to watch the Marvel movies in order.