Delroy Lindo Talks About MCU’s ‘Blade’ and Why It Didn’t Work Out

Delroy Lindo has had a long and impressive career, and one of the biggest projects he was excited about recently was Marvel’s Blade movie. But like many fans now know, the film has run into a lot of problems, and Lindo is no longer part of it.

In a new interview, Lindo opened up about his time with Blade and what went wrong. He said he was really excited when Marvel first reached out to him.

“When Marvel came to me, they seemed to be really interested in my input,” Lindo said. He talked with the producers, the writer, and the director at the time, and it all felt very creative and promising. “It was really exciting conceptually, but it was also exciting in terms of the character that was going to form,” he added.

Although Marvel has never said which role Lindo was going to play, he shared that the character reminded him of Marcus Garvey, a Black activist and leader from the early 1900s.

“There was a Marcus Garvey-esque component to who this man was shaping up to be,” Lindo explained. His character would have been the head of a Black community and had strong beliefs and values. “He was a character who had, very similar to Sinners, created a community, a Black community,” he said.

But despite all the early excitement, things slowly fell apart. Lindo said, “Then, for whatever reason, it just went off the rails.” Marvel changed directors and writers several times, and the film was removed from its release calendar.

This wasn’t the first time a Marvel project didn’t work out for Lindo. He was also supposed to be in a Marvel TV spinoff years ago, playing a character named Dominic Fortune. That show never got made. But when he was cast in Blade, the creators of the older show sent him a kind message. “They said something like, ‘Congratulations, man. We’re very happy for you,’” Lindo recalled.

Even though Blade didn’t work out, Lindo sees it as part of the journey. “Despite how these experiences turned out, they all helped to create the Delroy Lindo of today,” he said.

Right now, he’s focusing on other projects and is even writing a book about parts of his career. And through it all, he keeps his mindset grounded: “I told my son and his friends, you never know who’s watching. Always do your best. Somebody may come back around.”

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