Remembering Stan Lee’s First Marvel Movie Cameo in ‘X-Men’

Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee passed away today, causing fans to look back on his legendary impact — including his first of many Marvel movie cameos.

For many, Lee’s trend of making scene-stealing appearances in Marvel movies began in 2000, when the comic book creator played a hot dog stand vendor in X-Men.

In the scene, which you can watch above, Lee can be seen among the crowd of people on a beach, who are watching in confusion as Robert Kelly (Bruce Davison) washes up on a beach. Kelly, having just been turned into a water-morphing mutant by Magneto (Ian McKellan), makes his way through the crowd of people, before watching a report about the U.N. summit on a nearby TV.

Granted, it technically isn’t the first time that the industry titan appeared in a Marvel movie, with him playing a jury foreman in the TV movie The Trial of the Incredible Hulk. But for many, his first big-screen appearance in X-Men still holds a special place in their hearts, and arguably set in motion the trend of keeping an eye out for Lee in Marvel movies.

As Fox’s X-Men universe went on, Lee made a fair share of other cameos, including appearing with Chris Claremont in X-Men: The Last Stand, playing an MC at a strip club in Deadpool, and appearing alongside his wife, Joan, in X-Men: Apocalypse. Lee’s most recent cameo on the X-Men side of things was on the series premiere of The Gifted, when Lee could be seen leaving a restaurant.

“The Stan Lee thing was just luck,” The Gifted star Coby Bell told ComicBook.com. “He happened to be in Dallas. [Executive Producer Matt Nix and Producer Derek Hoffman] went to where he was and were like, ‘Hey man, we’re doing an X-Men TV show. Will you come and pop in? It happened in like a day…And he was like, ‘Sure!’ and he just came by and did it.”

Lee was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center from his home in Hollywood Hills early Monday morning. He died at the hospital later the same day. No cause of death has been named as of yet, but Lee has recently been stricken with a number of illnesses, including a bout of pneumonia. He was 95 years old.