When you’re responsible for wiping out half the universe, people are going to keep bringing it up. So obviously, most fan questions Josh Brolin gets asked have to do with Thanos, especially from curious minds who want to know if the Titan will ever return. However, the actor was recently asked about an entirely different character in the Marvel universe. Now, I’m aware that Brolin still has love for Thanos, but the real question is: Would he ever come back as Deadpool 2’s Cable?
With the upcoming X-Men reboot, people want to know if we’ll be seeing him again. So while promoting his new survival thriller Whalefall at NYCC, The Direct asked what the likelihood of seeing Cable again is, and Brolin revealed:
Thanos to me is a very, very interesting role, and a role that I had a lot of fun doing. You know what I mean? A lot of fun doing. Joe Russo, Anthony Russo, those guys to me, they're just unprecedented, unparalleled... There's some practicality to it, but when you resort to your imagination, and they would come up and they would reference Scarface or something like that, something that I understood, then it made it even better. 'Deadpool 2', I'm glad happened. I'm glad [Cable] was isolated unto that experience, and it's a good memory.
In the movie, the character is a time-traveling anti-hero who was also the son of Scott Summers and a clone of Jean Grey. Some ‘timey-wimey’ stuff later, and he’s back in the present after living in a dystopian future. With various X-Men, including James Marsden as Cyclops, coming back, it makes sense that people want to know about Cable. However, it sounds like Brolin is happy to leave that character in the past. Although Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld has shared that he thinks there’s “much more meat on those bones” when it comes to Cable.
So, hear me out. In the spirit of reboots, they could cast a younger Cable and do an origin story as part of a grander X-Men plot. We have Mister Sinister in the upcoming reboot, which could lead to a Jean clone, and this could bring the story full circle to Cable earlier in his journey. Now that there’s a mergence of the mutant characters with our MCU, anything is technically possible.
While Brolin’s time as Cable seems to be “isolated” in the past, that doesn’t mean his time as the Mad Titan is over forever. The actor has shared that if the Russo Brothers ever asked, then he’d be open to returning. So maybe if the right person asked, he'd return (even for just a cameo) as Cable one day.
While we're all still thinking about his Marvel work, Brolin has been hard at work outside of the MCU. In addition to Whalefall in October, the actor also had The Dog Stars out this year, which he described as one of the “more creative, satisfying” projects he’s been part of. He also has a role in Dune: Part 3, which hits the 2026 schedule on December 18 alongside Avengers: Doomsday.
So even though we won't be seeing Cable or Thanos anytime soon, you can go see him reprise his role as Gurney Halleck in Dune.
