You’d think that starring alongside Spider-Man in the MCU and getting to attend the big premiere of a huge movie would be a real career highlight for most actors, but not for Hannibal Buress. The comedian plays Coach Wilson in Spidey’s section of the MCU timeline, but when it came to the premiere of Homecoming, the first Spider-Man movie, he paid a lookalike to go in his place.
Buress has now made an appearance in two of the three Spider-Man movies, as the P.E teacher for Peter, MJ, and Ned at Midtown High School. In his most recent outing in an MCU movie, Coach Wilson actively believes the rumours that Peter Parker is a murderer, and is regularly seen as a bit of a moody, miserable MCU character.
In real life, however, the funny man clearly didn’t even want to be near his MCU co-stars, as he ditched the red carpet event back in 2017 and sent a doppelgänger in his place instead. Turns out he found the guy on social media, and paid him handsomely for the job.
At the time, Buress put an advertisement out on his social media accounts asking for lookalikes to take his place at the big premiere for Spider-Man: Homecoming. The actor offered $500 to the best man for the job.
That man, was actor Joe Caroll. Unfortunately, Marvel bosses cottoned on to the ploy and cut any footage of Buress’s proxy from their red carpet videos.
Caroll posted about the situation on his Instagram account, with the caption, “When Hannibal Buress hits you up and tells you to crash the red carpet since he couldn’t make it… You crash the damn red carpet.”
Of course, we don’t really think Buress meant any malice in this little publicity stunt. We’re sure he was just very busy and didn’t want to let Marvel down.