SPOILERS AHEAD FOR “PEACEMAKER”
HBO Max and James Gunn’s “Peacemaker” series came to a close the other night and featured a surprise appearance by some familiar faces of the DCEU.
The series is a direct spinoff of “The Suicide Squad” with Gunn writing and directing most episodes which take place in the same continuity as the other recent DC films like “Wonder Woman,” “Aquaman” and “Justice League”.
Four members of that league show up in the end – Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and The Flash. The former two are only in silhouette and don’t speak so were played by stand-ins.
However both Jason Momoa and Ezra Miller showed up in full costume to engage in banter about a series-long joke about Aquaman having a fish fetish. Gunn has now spoken about how the cameos came to be. First he tells Variety how they enlisted Momoa:
“I think before we ever shot the show, we talked to Jason about it. We were like, ‘Listen, [Peacemaker] says you f— fish all the time.’ And we were a little afraid he would be upset, but he just laughed. He was cool. So he was pretty much on board from the beginning.”
Then he spoke to Deadline to discuss how Miller came onboard:
“Ezra came in as more of a surprise. I found out through a couple of friends that Ezra liked my films, and so then I connected with him and asked him to do it, as well. So, yeah, we were just lucky with the two of them.”
It also turns out that Miller’s cameo was shot with the help of those on the set of Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” in Atlanta and was something of a payback for a favor DC did for Marvel:
It was nice because we shot it on the set and with the crew of ‘Guardians of The Galaxy: Vol. 3.’ You know, they were kind of paying us back, though, because DC, Chukwudi Iwuji, we used the Peacemaker crew to shoot Chukwudi’s screen test for ‘Guardians 3,’ and DC was really cool about that, and then Marvel was really cool about letting us use our crew to shoot Ezra.”
The cameos also tie-in to a bit of cross-promotion with both Miller and Momoa having their respective “The Flash” and “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” films due out towards year’s end.
