No, X-Men fans, Peter from “Deadpool 2” and “Deadpool & Wolverine” is not Peter Wisdom. Peter actor Rob Delaney confirmed this in a red carpet interview with ScreenRant, and we offer our deepest nerd condolences to anyone who may have been invested in this.
The presence of Delaney’s character Peter, a supporting player in David Leitch’s 2018 action/comedy “Deadpool 2,” is a joke unto itself. Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is assembling a team of superheroes called the X-Force that he intends to employ for a skydiving-based rescue mission. Deadpool is such a non-credible deadbeat, though, that he can’t afford to be too choosy about who joins his team. He recruits characters like Shatterstar (Lewis Tan), Domino (Zazie Beetz), and Bedlam (Terry Crews), but also deigns to take on Peter, a regular, kind of dorky middle-aged guy with no superpowers.
When the trailer for “Deadpool 2” first dropped, /Film theorized that Delaney could be playing Peter Wisdom, an X-Men character with deep ties to X-Force. The character was first introduced in an issue of the Britain-set X-Men comic “Excalibur,” dated February of 1995, and, like all comic book characters, he underwent multiple dramatic life events in a very short amount of time. He dated Shadowcat, became the mentor for X-Force, seemingly died, returned, and became the head of a spy agency. In the comics, Pete Wisdom can absorb heat from the environment around him and channel it into magical “hot knives” that protrude from his fingers.
The character also starred in his own series of comics in 2006 called simply “Wisdom,” and he likely has at least a few fans out there. For those who think he appeared in the “Deadpool” movies, though, that wasn’t Peter Wisdom. That was just Peter.
It’s easy to understand why fans might have thought Peter was Peter Wisdom
The issue of Peter’s identity may be a little confusing, as Wisdom in both “Deadpool 2” and the 2024 follow-up “Deadpool & Wolverine.” On IMDb, however, his proper credit of just “Peter” is retained. In the red carpet interview, Delaney was 100% unambiguous on the matter, saying:
“Peter Wisdom is a guy from the comics. My character is not Peter Wisdom. He’s just a guy named Peter. And I think maybe they arbitrarily gave him the last initial ‘W,’ which explains the confusion. But in fact, [he’s] just Peter, created from whole cloth by the writers.”
Sometimes actors in Marvel Comics-based movies have to be coy about spoilers and plot details, but it seems that Delaney is not being coy in this case. He seems to genuinely be saying he isn’t playing Pete Wisdom.
The arc of Delaney’s actual character is pretty hilarious unto itself. Peter is recruited into X-Force, meets a grisly fate, is saved through the miracle of time travel, and then proves to be deeply beloved across the multiverse in “Deadpool & Wolverine.” Peter turns up in that film’s climax, which involves hundreds of parallel-universe Deadpools pouring through an interdimensional portal to fight each other. When Peter arrives on the scene, however, every Deadpool pauses to marvel at his presence. It seems that all Deadpools have a Peter in their home dimension, and that they all hold him in very high esteem. The hundreds of Deadpools embrace Peter, and he enjoys the attention.
But surely Peter could still be Pete Wisdom, right?
With a universe as long-lived and complex as Marvel Comics, of course, some fans may happily chime in with an optimistic “never say die” attitude about Rob Delaney playing Pete Wisdom. Indeed, as “Deadpool & Wolverine” proved, every character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has an untold number of parallel doppelgängers from all across the multiverse. Even if the original Pete Wisdom is a suave British James Bond-type with heat knife powers, and the movie Peter is a dippy American everyman, there’s no reason why those characters can’t be one and the same across the multiverse, right?
And, heck, “Deadpool 2” made a lot of vital changes to known comic book characters, including the aforementioned Shatterstar, a.k.a Rusty. In the comics, Shatterstar is an interdimensional traveler from Mojoworld, something he does explain in “Deadpool 2.” But in the movie, he doesn’t become a vital member of the team. Indeed, he has an unfortunate run-in with a helicopter. Deadpool, thereafter, quips that no one is going to miss Shatterstar. Nonetheless, the character returned for a very brief cameo in “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
So why not do something like that for Pete Wisdom? As of this writing, /Film has been gathering information about the upcoming X-Men film from Marvel Studios, citing a familiar line-up and keeping track of pieces of casting. (Inde Navarrette from “Obsession” has been cast as the character of Rogue, for instance.) Time will tell if the makers of the new X-Men will have enough of a sense of humor to cast Rob Delaney as Pete Wisdom.
