The Real Reason That Halle Berry’s Storm Isn’t in Deadpool & Wolverine

This article contains spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine.

Do you know what happens to a movie star when they’re not asked to be in your movie? Same thing that happens to everything else. Or, to put it another way, you gotta ask actors to be in your films.

That’s the lesson that Ryan Reynolds might be learning, at least according to Halle Berry. In conversation with ComicBook.com, Berry explained the absence of her X-Men character Storm in Deadpool & Wolverine.

“Blake [Lively] asked me one time,” Berry recalled in the interview. “I ran into her at a Marc Jacobs fashion show, and she said, ‘Would you ever be in my husband’s movie as Storm?’ I said, ‘Yeah, if he asked me,’ but he never asked me.”

To be frank, Storm has never been Berry’s best work, and it was enough of a surprise to see her reprise the role for a few scenes in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Berry was among the bigger stars when the first X-Men released in 2000, but her Storm received so little attention in that movie that nobody even cared when she dropped the ambiguous accent after the first movie.

That said, Deadpool & Wolverine features A LOT of people who seemed done with their parts. Nobody speaks highly of Jennifer Garner‘s take on Elektra, but she’s a standout in Deadpool‘s first MCU outing. Wesley Snipes remains fantastic as Blade, but not only did he leave the franchise unhappily with Blade Trinity, but he seemed to resent Reynolds for getting more attention in that 2004 film. And then there’s Channing Tatum‘s Gambit, whose movie never even got out of production hell. So it wouldn’t have been crazy for Reynolds to consider a return for Berry’s Storm. Heck, recently leaked concept art shows Ben Affleck’s Daredevil and Nicolas Cage‘s Ghost Rider also in on the fun.

But there’s one important aspect that makes Berry’s return unlikely. Outside of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, none of the Fox X-Men are back in Deadpool & Wolverine. In fact, the whole point of Jackman’s alternate-reality Logan is that he failed his teammates and allowed them to die. Aaron Stanford plays Pyro again in Deadpool & Wolverine, but he’s a villain, as is Tyler Mane as Sabertooth. In fact, almost all of the other X-villains in the movie are played by different actors, with Aaron W. Reed standing in for Vinnie Jones as Juggernaut and Jade Lye instead of Kelly Hu as Lady Deathstrike.

Most notably, neither James McAvoy nor Patrick Stewart show up as Charles Xavier, a figure that Deadpool, Wolverine, and primary antagonist Cassandra Nova talk about often. One would expect a shot of some Professor X, especially when Cassandra is probing Wolvie’s mind.

It’s possible earlier versions of the script may have wanted more of the old X-Men in the multiverse-heavy Deadpool & Wolverine. But it’s also likely that the non-X-Men version of the story came along before filming started, and that’s the real reason that Reynolds never asked Berry about the part.

Deadpool & Wolverine is currently in theaters.