Marvel Star Don Cheadle Responds to Claim He “Aunt Viv’d” Terrence Howard

Don Cheadle has come a long way in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The actor first played James “Rhodey” Rhodes AKA War Machine in Iron Man 2 and went on to appear in Iron Man 3, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier as well as voicing the character in What If…? The actor is also expected to return in Secret Invasion before he goes on to star in his own film, Armor Wars. Of course, Cheadle was not the first actor to play Rhodey in the MCU. Terrence Howard originally played the role in Iron Man, but Cheadle doesn’t like the accusation that he “Aunt Viv’d” Howard. This, of course, is referring to the recasting of Aunt Viv on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. 

“I ‘Aunt Viv’d’ him? I did not move Terrence out of a role,” Cheadle clarified to GQ. “He was not… they had decided that they weren’t… that was not happening. Then it was an open part. I was at my kid’s laser tag birthday party and they called me and said, ‘This is what’s happening. We’re giving you the offer. If you don’t say yes, we’re going to the next person. This is gonna happen very fast.’ So they said, ‘Why don’t you go ahead and take an hour and decide if you want to do it.’”

Cheadle continued, “It was a six-movie deal. I was like, ‘In an hour I have to decide? What are the other movies’ They’re like, ‘It’s gonna be these Avengers, it’s gonna be these many Iron Mens, this is what it is, so you’re gonna have to say yes or no if you’re in or out.’ Like, ‘What’s the trajectory of the character gonna be?’ They’re like, ‘We don’t know any of that, but this is what it is. So, you’ve got an hour.’ I said, ‘I’m at my kid’s laser tag birthday party.’ They’re like, ‘Oh, take two hours. Take two hours,’” Cheadle added with a laugh. “So, we played laser tag for two hours and I was talking to my wife and we just kind of thought about it and talked to my agent and tried to get as much information as we could and we just said we’d do it.”

What is Armor Wars About?

Armor Wars will be inspired by the comic of the same name that sees Tony Stark’s technology fall into the wrong hands. 

“If you know anything about the lore, and you’ve read the comic books, you understand that it’s a series that was built around Tony’s Stark Tech getting out and Rhodey taking it on to go get this tech back from the bad hands, the bad actors whose hands it is in,” Cheadle said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “And as Marvel does, it’s also an opportunity to take the mythology and tip it on its head a little bit and come up with different ways to tell the story, so it’s doing that and has done that in spades.”

Stay tuned for more updates about Armor Wars.