Comic book icon Stan Lee tells us he's fine being that Marvel cameo guy

Stan Lee is done with all that behind-the-scenes stuff.

These days, he’s happy to mug for the camera in

-- and possibly beat Alfred Hitchcock's record for most onscreen cameos. (Lee’s been in 22 Marvel films to date, in case you were wondering).

The co-creator of famous superheroes like Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Iron Man, the 92-year-old Lee is basking in the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and his now-famous status as "that guy" in every Marvel movie.

Actually, he may be more well-known in some circles for his cameo work than as a comic book icon. But he’s fine with that, he tells Paste BN:
“The one thing that really surprises me when I go to these conventions, the young kids seem to know me as well as their parents or their grandparents. So thanks to these movies, it looks like everybody knows Marvel, and if they know Marvel, they know me because I pop up in all of these things.”


Lee originally popped up only in the movies based on characters he’d created, but he’s become so synonymous with Marvel that now he’s even showing up in a non-human function, like this photo cameo in Netflix's Daredevil.

So what’s his favorite cameo so far?
“I think one of the funniest was the one in the Fantastic Four (Rise of the Silver Surfer) where I tried to get to the wedding of Sue and Reed and they wouldn’t let me in because they didn’t believe I was Stan Lee. I guess I don’t look enough like him.”
(It beats

Hugh Hefner in Iron Man.)

Good news for Avengers: Age of Ultron fans: Lee has a cameo in that, too -- but he won't spill too many details about it.
“It is the first cameo I’ve done that actually has two scenes. One scene is a setup, and then there’s the next scene that sinks it. But you mustn’t blink your eye because each scene is about half a second long.”
Though he “would prefer not to” have any creative input on the movies and just show up for half a day to film his blink-or-you’ll-miss-it cameos, he’s still happy about how the Marvel Cinematic Universe has fleshed out the characters he originally put on the page.
“I think the movies have been so true to the characters -- they have made the characters even better than I thought they could be.”
By the way, Gillette is giving away a set of Avengers-inspired razors signed by Stan Lee in anticipation of Avengers: Age of Ultron. You can enter the contest at Comics Alliance.