Avengers: Endgame Includes Surprising Community Cameos

Avengers: Endgame is currently at the beginning of its impressive theatrical run, and it’s bringing a slew of staples that certain Marvel Cinematic Universe films are known for. And as some eagle-eyed comedy fans probably noticed, that involves new cameos from Community.

Spoilers for Avengers: Endgame below! Only look if you want to know!

Cameos from Community cast members have become a sort of running theme in MCU films directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, and Endgame is no exception. The first cameo comes relatively early on in the film, as Scott Lang/Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) escapes from the Quantum Realm and into 2023. Considering the fact that five years have passed since Thanos’ Decimation, Scott’s Quantum Realm van is stuck in a storage facility, which appears to be guarded by a security guard played by Ken Jeong.

Later on in the movie, when Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) and Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) travel to the 1970s to rescue the Tesseract, they share an elevator with a SHIELD agent played by Yvette Nicole Brown.

As Community fans will remember, Jeong played Professor Chang throughout the show’s run, while Brown played Shirley Bennett. The trend of Community cameos began with Abed actor Danny Pudi playing a SHIELD agent in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Dean Jim Rash then played an M.I.T. representative in a scene in Captain America: Civil War.

To an extent, this pair of cameos rectify the fact that there wasn’t one in Avengers: Infinity War, as Jeong was rumored to appear in a deleted scene involving Howard the Duck. And the cameos also serve as a tongue-in-cheek homage to the Russos previous work directing shows like Community and Arrested Development.

“It’s a complex tone, and it’s a unique tone because it’s made up of several different franchises that have very different tones,” Joe Russo said of Infinity War in an interview last year. “It’s sort of an unprecedented experiment because never before has someone taken very successful franchises and merged them all together. But, as we’ve mentioned, we like cross-pollinating genre, and we like experimentation in narrative. So it was exciting for us. The reason that we wanted to do the film was because the level of ambition was so high with it.”

“We’ve always had a creative process throughout our careers where we like to combine things that don’t seem like they belong together and see what you get. We describe it as like a mad scientist process.” Anthony Russo added. “If you go back to something like Arrested Development, an example of this would be that you take a completely absurdist story and you shoot it in the most grounded, realistic way you can possibly present a narrative. The incongruity of those two things gives you something that feels fun and weird and interesting. We’ve applied that same process to combining all these different tones, all these different characters. It’s really just a process of us thinking about how you smash those things together. The way we end up balancing it is that we always try to ground it in an emotional truth for the character. That becomes our guidepost. If something doesn’t feel emotionally true or emotionally real for a character, then we can’t follow that storyline. We have to always use that as our guidepost through the narrative, and that’s how we hold everything together ultimately.”

What do you think of Avengers: Endgame‘s Community cameos? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame are in theaters now. Spider-Man: Far From Home will land in theaters on July 2nd.