Who is Bedlam, Terry Crews’ Deadpool 2 character

Deadpool 2 introduces us to a host of new mutant characters without giving much information about them away. They’re all involved — even Terry Crews’ Bedlam — in the movie’s own version of X-Force.

It wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t even know Crews was in Deadpool 2. The movie’s first trailer was our first glimpse of the actor, whose participation in the production had been unannounced. Quick-eyed Redditors managed to pick out his identity in a stack of headshots of X-Men characters Deadpool was be going through. Blink and you’ll miss it, but a headshot of Crews’ character is labeled “Bedlam.”

A headshot of “Peter,” with Crews or Bedlam’s headshot seen on the right.

20th Century Fox

Who is Bedlam?

Created in 1995 by writer John Francis Moore and artist Steve Epting, Bedlam’s mutation gives him the ability to manipulate electromagnetic fields, even within the human brain. This allows him to affect the neural chemistry of people nearby, projecting sensations of pain or confusion into their minds.

[Warning: The rest of this post contains spoilers for Deadpool 2.]

Crews’ Bedlam turns out to have exactly the same set of abilities in Deadpool 2 — appearing alongside Zazie Beetz as Domino, Lewis Tan as Shatterstar, Bill Skarsgård as Zeitgeist, and Brad Pitt as Vanisher — when he joins Deadpool in forming X-Force.

But if you’ve seen the film you’ll know he doesn’t get to use those powers for very long, as most of X-Force dies gruesomely, comedically and immediately after beginning their first mission. An ignominious start for what many people thought was a tease at the lineup of Fox’s upcoming X-Force movie, featuring Josh Brolin’s Cable in the role of team leader.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Bedlam or any of the rest of them are down for the count.

“It’s like soap operas: anyone come back to life at any time,” Deadpool 2 screenwriter Paul Wernick told Polygon. “Whether we have a time machine or not, we’ve been given that liberty based on the source material.”

“Time machine” here refers, of course, to the literal time machine that Deadpool uses in the movie’s mid-credits scene to revert some of the movie’s casualties (and to cause other casualties, in different timelines). But regardless of the method of resurrection, Wernick isn’t super worried about killing characters off in Deadpool 2.

“I think we’ll build X-Force as we want to build X-Force. We gave up a little logic for comedy in [Deadpool 2].”

And there isn’t a better motto for writing a Deadpool movie than that.

Correction: It seems we were wrong about assuming that the person in Deadpool 2 who looked like Brad Pitt was director David Leitch — Vanisher was actually portrayed by Brad Pitt. Leitch has worked as Pitt’s stunt double in five films.