In case you didn’t know, Michael Jai White voiced Blade in Marvel’s Midnight Suns (2022). It’s such an obvious casting that you have to ask yourself: why didn’t Marvel Studios approach him to be Blade in the MCU in the first place? After all, he has experience as a superhero from playing Spawn, and he’s a bona fide action star in the same mold as the beloved Daywalker actor, Wesley Snipes, so he seems like a natural fit for the part.
Well, it’s not for lack of trying. As it turns out, White has quite the complicated history with Blade. When asked if he would answer Marvel’s call to be in the MCU, the actor told the One54 Africa podcast, “Dude, I’ve responded to a thing that said we want a Michael J. White type and didn’t get it.”
Everybody laughed about how utterly ridiculous that notion is, but as White elaborated, this is the reality of show business. In the same interview, he revealed that he auditioned for the lead in the 2006 Blade TV series (Spike TV’s Blade: The Series), which was set after the events of Blade: Trinity. However, the role went to rapper Sticky Fingaz in the end (he has since told ComicBook.com it came down to the two of them). White explained how part of the audition process required Blade to chop the heads off mannequins – something suited to his martial arts training – but when he asked specific questions about the choreography and other aspects of the scene, he received no real answers.
“I’m asking technical questions,” he said. “‘Okay, so what are they thinking about?’ I go in there for that, and I notice there’s dialogue after dialogue that’s been changed for the next auditions. Little by little, the white lady is now telling Blade what to do.”
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White equated this experience to what had happened on Blade: Trinity. “So very much like that third movie,” he said. When I saw Ryan Reynolds and Blade was written underneath… Oh, I see. Because I’ve been in that scenario before. I see that it’s not quite Blade. You want to make this about the other characters. You do this to bolster [them]. And so because that was the mandate, they were trying to do that, and that’s not really what I’d want to do.”
Famously, Blade: Trinity (24% on Rotten Tomatoes) made more headlines for its behind-the-scenes shenanigans and accusations about Snipes’ bad behavior than anything else. White’s perspective, though, shines a different light on the situation. Maybe Snipes saw the same thing happening to him and didn’t like it.
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All three Blade movies, including Blade: Trinity, are streaming on Peacock in the US.
