Bullet Train’s Surprise Cameos Will Make You Do A Double Take

Modern Hollywood movie making at the studio level is built on Easter eggs and cameos, and though we mostly associate that with something like Marvel and DC movies, Columbia Pictures’ Bullet Train proves that original movies can do it too. Though loaded with plenty of familiar faces at its course, Brad Pitt stars alongside Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Joey King, Brian Tyree Henry, and others, there’s a couple of key moments in the movie that feature some surprise cameos. The best part is that they all kind of make sense when you look at Bullet Train from a macro view. Let’s dig in, SPOILERS follow!

The first of these cameos happens almost immediately and it’s Sandra Bullock voicing Maria Beetle, the handler of Brad Pitt’s Ladybug. Though her voice is heard throughout most of the movie, and she is credited by name at the close, she doesn’t appear onscreen until its final scene. Some viewers may have been expecting Bullock too since her appearance had been publicized but the first surprise cameo comes out of nowhere, or does it? While fleeing Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s character, Pitt offers money to a man to wear his fat and glasses to throw ATJ off while he flees. That man is none other than Channing Tatum, who assumes that Pitt approaching him on the bullet train is “a sex thing.”

There’s one more surprise cameo and this one requires a bit of explanation. At the crux of Bullet Train is that there are multiple assassins on the train itself, and it becomes clear that most of them are there because the mysterious White Death, leader of the Japanese underworld, put them all there with the hopes of getting revenge and also that they would eliminate each other. There’s one catch though, Brad Pitt’s Ladybug isn’t the person that the White Death hired and hoped to see eliminated. The White Death was seeking an assassin known as Carver, who is the hitman that killed his wife in a car accident-style hit. When Ladybug confirms to the White Death that he’s not Carver we get a glimpse of the real Carver, and it’s none other than Ryan Reynolds behind the mask. He appears on screen for maybe two seconds.

So where did all this come from? Tatum’s cameo seems like an addition that ties into his recent feature film . Not only did he star in that movie with Sandra Bullock but Brad Pitt has a role in it as well, one probably equivalent to Bullock’s in Bullet Train. To put a cherry on top, Tatum is shown reading what’s clearly a romance novel in Bullet Train, having just played a romance novel cover model in The Lost City. Reynolds on the other hand it’s easy to see how he ended up here, having starred in Deadpool 2 which had Bullet Train director David Leitch behind the camera. Coincidewntally as you may recall, Deadpool 2 also features a surprise two-second cameo form….Brad Pitt.

Bullet Train is now playing in theaters.