Don Cheadle has done a stellar job of portraying the MCU’s Colonel Rhodes over the years, making his debut way back in 2010 as Terrence Howard’s replacement for Iron Man 2. However, it turns out that War Machine as we know him was put under a lot of pressure to accept the mantle.
Cheadle recounts receiving a phone call from Marvel Studio’s decision makers while at his daughter’s laser tag birthday party with an initial six-movie offer. Naturally, the actor had questions about the nature of the role he was stepping into – what his character arc would be, what the future films would look like, and so on. He didn’t get much of a response, and more of a deadline:
They’re like, ‘We’re not sure about any of those answers, but you need an answer in an hour.’ And I said, I’m at my daughter’s birthday party laser tag game. They said, ‘Oh! Take two hours.’
“So, you know, you had to take two hours to decide if this is something that you’re going to do for however many years that was going to turn out to be. I talked to my wife about it, and we just kind of said, yeah let’s roll the dice and see.”
Cheadle mentions during his interview with Entertainment Weekly that the experience of portraying James Rhodes was unlike anything he could’ve ever imagined, so while the clock on the offer was somewhat unreasonable on Marvel’s part, we can probably bet that Cheadle was glad he took the job – and we all are too.
Don Cheadle will of course be reprising his role as the MCU’s Colonel James Rhodes aka War Machine in a number of projects, firstly in the upcoming Disney Plus series Secret Invasion, slated for release sometime in early 2023, as well as the feature film Armor Wars.
The series will see Samuel L. Jackson and Cobie Smulders return in their respective roles as Nick Fury and Maria Hill respectively, while a certain high-profile Game of Thrones alum will also make their MCU debut in the series.