Wesley Snipes breaks two world records with latest Blade cameo
Actor Wesley Snipes has set two new Guinness World Records with his latest Blade cameo, given in the new Deadpool & Wolverine movie. Blade is arguably one of Snipes’ most iconic roles and he has portrayed the character on several occasions.
The half-human, half-vampire Marvel character turned up in the superhero movie 25 years and 340 days after Snipes first played him in the 1998 film Blade, meaning he’s taken a record previously held by co-star Hugh Jackman.
Jackman previously held the record for the longest career as a live-action Marvel superhero, with the Australian actor first playing the clawed hero Wolverine back in 2000 in the first X-Men movie.
If that weren’t big enough for Snipes, then perhaps the fact that he also set another Guinness World Record in the process might be. Not only is he the new longest-serving Marvel character actor, but he is also the actor who has the longest gap between appearances in Marvel movies.
Before turning up in Deadpool & Wolverine, Snipes last played Blade in Blade: Trinity 19 years and 231 days before his most recent effort, which took the record from Alfred Molina, who had a 17 year gap between playing Doc Ock in 2004’s Spider-Man 2 and reprising the character in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Snipes recently said he thought he would never play his famous Marvel character again, at least until Ryan Reynolds contacted him. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the actor noted that three Blade movies felt like more than enough.
“Over the years, we’ve had very interesting conversations, some of them very substantive and some of them not,” Snipes said. “So I kind of resided that I was moving on from them, which is okay. I did three of them, and I thought they turned out pretty good. Not so bad… So we move on to other things, and bigger and better things, as well.”
He added, “I didn’t think we would be able to pull it off. I didn’t think that Marvel was into it; Disney was into it, also because they had Mahershala [Ali] cast for the next version of it. I thought it didn’t make sense to me, but [when] you get a call from Ryan Reynolds out of the blue after 20 years, you go, ‘Okay, I got to take this call. Let’s see what this is about.'”
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