Ghost Rider actor appears to have had a change of heart on an MCU return

An actor who previously portrayed Marvel fan-favorite Ghost Rider is willing to consider a rebirth in the MCU. No, not Nicolas Cage.

Gabriel Luna played the Robbie Reyes version of Ghost Rider on Season 4 of Marvel’s ABC series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. In a recent Forbes interview, Luna (Terminator: Dark Fate, The Last of Us) said he’s now willing to revisit the character after years of telling fans he wanted to move on.

Luna explained:

“My stock answer used to be, ‘I loved what we did. I’m very happy with what we accomplished, and I can be happy leaving it on the shelf and admiring what we did and have the audience remember it fondly, the way they do. To do the character again just gives me another opportunity to screw it up.’“

However, only recently has Luna begun realizing just how popular Reyes is:

“I love that character. It was really special. It had only come into existence in 2014 [Robbie Reyes’ Ghost Rider], created by Felipe Smith, and then it was in 2016 that we did the show. And literally not a day goes by that somebody doesn’t ask me about it.

Hence, Luna’s feeling a bit more eager to bring back the flaming skull and anthropomorphic chains:

“It feels like the demand may be there, and if the creative is there and it makes sense … I think with Marvel right now, it’s so intricately woven that it would be a few years out if they started to think about it, to do the character. I’m always open.“

Why the back-and-forth? The way Luna explains it, he feels an extra connection to a character when there’s more source material to pull from besides a shooting script. But that can also make the character more intimidating to embody:

“With characters like Robbie, the Ghost Rider, and Tommy [The Last of Us], they’ve been established. And I’ve been able to access the source material, fall in love with it in a lot of ways, and sometimes when you love something that strongly, it may interrupt your process and what you’re trying to accomplish.“

Now, it seems the more pressing question isn’t Luna’s willingness to return, but whether the character from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D even lines up with the current version of the MCU. At this point, it’s still unclear if Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D is considered canon, given that one of its biggest plot points would seem to negate major character deaths in the films.

However, now that the multiverse is open — at least that version of New York City with the pizza balls — maybe Reyes doesn’t need to line up with anything that came before. Perhaps he can simply roar through a wormhole on his bike, and fans of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D get a little callback while the rest of Marvel fandom gets a cool new character. Thanks to an economy that’s dead set on rapidly monetizing anything at all that people recognize, rest assured there’s always a way to bring back our heroes.