Dark Details About The Avengers Cast

With four “Avengers” movies and more on the way, it seems like every actor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a member of a superhero team roster. And with the “X-Men” and “The Fantastic Four” joining the fight in “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Avengers: Secret Wars,” it’s almost as if every actor in Hollywood is or will be a member of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Hyperbole or not, it’s true that Marvel’s roster of stars includes some of the biggest names in Hollywood, from Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans to Robert Downey Jr. and Samuel L. Jackson.

Many of the “Avengers” cast happen to be among the most beloved actors of all time, so you probably know a fair bit about them. They appear regularly in the gossip columns, sure, but they’re such big stars that their personal lives often show up on major news networks, too. Still, for all you think you know about them, there’s probably a lot more that you don’t, and while they’re all superstars, that doesn’t mean their lives have been free of difficult circumstances.

In fact, a few members of the “Avengers” cast have some pretty troubling pasts, with tragedies and experiences that some of us could never imagine. That they have endured such hardships is proof that they may be just as strong as the heroes they play on screen. So sit back and read on about the dark details of the cast of “The Avengers.”

In 2025, Scarlett Johansson will make her directorial debut with “Eleanor the Great,” a drama about a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor living in New York City. The “Avengers” star chose the project as her first project as a director for an unexpected reason — because she has a personal connection to the story. As she discovered in a 2017 episode of the PBS documentary series “Finding Your Roots,” her family’s ancestors were survivors of the Jewish Holocaust during World War II.

In the episode, Johannson is stunned when she learns that her great-great-uncle and his family died in the Warsaw Ghetto during the war. That uncle was Mosze Szlamberg, the brother of her maternal grandfather, Saul, and, according to historical records, Mosze and his children all perished in Warsaw. “It’s crazy to imagine that Saul would be on the other side selling bananas on Ludlow Street and how different it would be being in America at that time,” she said in the episode (via Yad Vashem). The fate of one brother versus the other.”

A learning experience, the show helped give the star a deeper appreciation for her family’s past. Now, she has a chance to explore that history.

The child of superstar actor James Brolin and Hollywood casting director Jane Cameron, Josh Brolin suffered through a difficult childhood that often saw him raised solely by his mother when his father was working, a situation that left the young boy as the only person to help her while she struggled with alcohol abuse. Often brought along when she was carousing at bars, Brolin was exposed to a very adult life at a very young age, leading to him falling into a cycle of substance abuse.

During his formative years, Brolin found himself dabbling in drugs, everything from marijuana and alcohol to more serious narcotics like LSD — all before he was 15 years old. During this time of his life, the actor says he was eventually motivated to curb his bad behavior as a teen because he wanted to stay out of jail, but all told, he’s done nine stints behind bars and continued to struggle with alcohol well into his 30s and early 40s. In 1995, he suffered the worst of it, though, when his mother died in a car crash that he believes was the result of driving while drunk.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

Plenty of Hollywood stars have struggled with drugs and alcohol, and some have famously done time in prison for their offenses. But few actors’ struggles have been as well-documented as those of Robert Downey Jr., the man who practically put the MCU on his back when the studio debuted “Iron Man” in 2008. RDJ’s dark history with substance abuse began well before he was an actor and continued when he was in the spotlight, so he often found himself front-page news during his darkest moments.

Never shy about his past, Downey has openly discussed his difficult childhood, which included heavy drug use as a preteen. Growing up with substance abusers for parents, his chaotic early years saw him doing drugs with his father, leading to a decades-long battle with addiction. Downey’s drug problems followed him to Hollywood, where he was arrested more than once even as he was starring in major movies like “Less Than Zero,” a film where he played a character who was also battling addiction.

Thankfully, after a wake-up call following his dismissal from “Ally McBeal” — a stint for which he received an Emmy nomination — Downey finally got his life in order. So when Marvel came calling, he was ready for the challenge.

Mark Ruffalo once experienced a tragedy that left him partially deaf and temporarily paralyzed, and years later, he experienced a loss that was far worse. In a 2017 interview with Men’s Journal, the actor discussed how his brother Scott was murdered in 2008 — a crime that remains unsolved to this day.

As Ruffalo described, he and his brother were especially close, having shared a $600-a-month apartment in New York in the 1980s, scrounging up the necessary money to live week to week. Years later, following a cancer scare that left him certain he’d be dead within months, Ruffalo got the tragic news that his brother had been killed, the victim of an unknown assailant at his home in Beverly Hills.

According to police reports, Scott Ruffalo was shot in the back of the head, while the lone witness died at the scene from a drug overdose. To this day, police have no leads, and Mark has coped with survivor’s guilt. “You always wonder, what could I have done differently?”

Traveling around the world for a movie shoot is fairly common when working on major blockbusters like “Doctor Strange” and “Avengers: Infinity War,” films that shot scenes as nearby as Atlanta, Georgia, and as far away as Kathmandu and Nepal. But what happened to Benedict Cumberbatch while filming the BBC miniseries “To the Ends of the Earth” in South Africa was anything but common.

In an interview with Variety, Cumberbatch talked about how, between shooting days, he and some friends took a trip to go diving. It was all fairly routine until their trip home, when they got a flat tire, were left stranded, and, to their utter shock, were abducted at gunpoint. A terrifying situation, the actor says they were led out into the middle of nowhere by car, forced out of the vehicle, and lined up on the side of the road as if they were going to be executed. Though the kidnappers fled before harming him or his friends, it gave Cumberbatch a new appreciation for life. “It made me impatient to live a life less ordinary, and I’m still dealing with that impatience.”

Plucked from “How I Met Your Mother,” TV star Cobie Smulders joined “The Avengers” on the big screen as Maria Hill, the right-hand woman of S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). It was a huge move for the actor, who went from one of TV’s biggest hits to one of the biggest movies of all time. This time period was a career high for Smulders, but what must have made it all the sweeter is that it hadn’t been that long ago that she’d been at the bottom following a cancer scare.

Though it wasn’t expected to be fatal, Smulders was diagnosed with ovarian cancer when she was just 25, a terrifying ordeal that also meant she might never have children. “I’ve always been very maternal, I’ve always loved children, and I’ve always wanted one of my own,” she told People Magazine in 2018. “Kids were very much not on my mind at 25, but I still wanted them one day — it was really hard and it was a really depressing thing to go through.”

Miraculously, doctors were able to remove the cancer without completely removing her ovaries, allowing Smulders to have two children, Shaelyn and Janita, in the following years.

Cast as Nick Fury in “The Avengers” thanks to his likeness being used in a Marvel comic in 2002, Samuel L. Jackson was one of the biggest names in “The Avengers” in 2012. Being at the top of one of the biggest blockbusters in history was a surprising place to find Jackson, considering where he started: growing up in poverty in the racially segregated South.

Born in Washington D.C., in 1948 and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, before the Civil Rights movement, Jackson lived with the racial divide all around him. “For me, everything was very separate,” Jackson told the Mercury News in 2017. “I went to a theater that was specifically black, in my neighborhood. My whole existence was black. I only encountered white people when I went downtown.” Jackson noted that the only Black actors he saw on screen — like Harry Belafonte or Sidney Poitier — were almost always dead by the end of the film, a trend he noticed even at a young age. That made the prospect of a leading man career in Hollywood particularly challenging.

“When I started getting cast in something, I’d flip through the script and see what page I died on.” Thankfully, that trend has changed, and, nearly 20 years after his MCU debut, Nick Fury is alive and kicking.

“Guardians of the Galaxy” star and $2 billion dollar actor Zoe Saldana had one of the most important roles in “Avengers: Infinity War,” playing Gamora, who was killed so that Thanos could complete his Infinity quest. In real life, though, it’s Saldana who had to deal with death at a young age after her father died when she was nine years old.

After losing her father in a car crash in 1988, Saldana was left to fend for herself and her siblings when the incident left her mother unable to function. “We all went straight into survival mode,” she revealed in a conversation with Harper’s Bazaar. “The moment he passed away, [my mother] wouldn’t get out of bed for more than a couple of years.” Eventually, Saldana’s mother sent her and her siblings to live in the Dominican Republic. In a faraway country and separated from her mother, Saldana grew closer to her two sisters. “I think that unified us even more because not everybody could relate.”

Ultimately, Saldana returned to her mother’s side in NYC, where she began ballet, leading to a love of performing on stage, and the rest is history.

Anthony Mackie joined the Avengers at the end of “Age of Ultron” and now leads his own team of heroes after the game-changing “Captain America: Brave New World.” As a young man, he probably never thought he would become one of the world’s greatest superheroes; after all, his father was a carpenter, and Mackie got his first taste of work helping his dad in the family roofing business. But while he was in high school, he suffered a life-changing event that changed his life’s trajectory: the death of his mother.

“It was unexpected and very untimely,” he said in a 2021 interview with Variety. “I was 15 when she was diagnosed with cancer, and a few months later, she was gone. She passed the day before my ninth-grade graduation,” Mackie told the outlet. “If my mom wouldn’t have passed away when I was so young, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

It’s a bittersweet realization, but the truth is, according to Mackie, that after his mother’s death led him into a downward spiral, a school instructor took him to an audition at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He was accepted into their program for his senior year of high school. “Everything I did, I did for my mama. The idea of leaving home at 17 to go away to school would have never been an option if she was still around.”

Former WWE star Dave Bautista played Drax the Destroyer in “Avengers: Infinity War,” another example of a superstar actor coming a long way from their humble upbringing. Bautista grew up in poverty in Washington, D.C., while regularly struggling for the bare necessities like food and clothing.

Poverty, though, wasn’t always the worst of it, because the future wrestling icon and Hollywood movie star was also surrounded by crime everywhere he looked. His situation was so bad, he witnessed a man being beaten before the assailant attempted to throw his victim from a highway overpass. Worse still, his mother once discovered a dead body just outside their home, the victim of a fatal gunshot wound.

Sadly, that wasn’t the end of Bautista’s struggles. As recently as 2012, just before being cast as Drax in “Guardians of the Galaxy,” he was just a few years out from his previous career in the lucrative world of wrestling and was having trouble finding work. Luckily, his life flipped on a dime when Marvel brought him into the MCU. “For people to really understand how much my life has changed,” Bautista told IGN, “they would have to understand where I came from, what I went through when I was in wrestling, what I left behind to take a chance on going into acting.”

Pom Klementieff joined the MCU in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” and nearly saved half the universe in “Avengers: Infinity War” when she came close to helping remove Thanos’ gauntlet. What you might not know about the actor, though, is that she has experienced so many family traumas that it makes one wonder how she can play such a happy-go-lucky hero as Mantis.

When Klementieff was just five years old, she lost her father to cancer, and she has few memories of him. Not long after, her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, so the future star was moved into the care of her aunt and uncle. If experiencing those two horrors back-to-back wasn’t bad enough, Klementieff’s father figure, her uncle Namou, died on her 18th birthday. But the worst was yet to come, because several years later, her brother took his own life. Surprisingly, she still manages to keep her perspective, not to mention a positive attitude.

“It’s life and s–t could be worse,” she told the Inquirer while promoting the “Guardians of the Galaxy” sequel in 2017.

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Losing a sibling is never not a horrific experience, no matter when it happens or what the cause is, be it suicide, disease, or a devastating accident. Paul Bettany, who plays the android superhero called the Vision in “The Avengers” films, knows this better than most. Not only did he lose his brother to tragic circumstances, but it occurred when his sibling was still very young.

When Bettany was just 16, his younger brother, eight years his junior, lost his life after an accident caused by a fatal head injury. It’s a loss that stays with Bettany to this day, but one that has helped motivate him, too. He keeps his younger brother’s sweater with him during film shoots, not just because it keeps his brother’s memory alive, but because it’s helpful when filming emotional scenes, with the actor using it to help bring forth powerful feelings on the set.

“Some people have amazing access to their emotions, and can switch them on like that,” he told The Gentleman’s Journal. “And I’m just not good enough to do that.”

Many people know that Sebastian Stan grew up in Romania; after all, he’s proud of his Eastern European heritage and was once famously delighted when an interviewer spoke to him in his native tongue. But what many may not know is that Stan’s Romanian youth was experienced under communist rule, and, according to the actor, his family was proudly rebellious.

“My parents were part of the youth that were standing up to communism,” Stan revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair. “My father was helping people escape the country illegally, to the point where he was a wanted man.” Stan’s father was such a marked man, in fact, that he was forced to abandon his home country and escape to the United States.

Sadly, Sebastian had little relationship with his father until he was older. Eventually, he and his mother relocated to Austria following the country’s 1989 revolution, and he eventually formed a relationship with his father after moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in Hollywood, where he got his big break in “Law & Order.” Eventually, Stan and his father formed a closer relationship, but all of that would come crashing down in 2021, when the senior Stan died of COVID.