Eric Dane Perfectly Captured a Fan-Favorite X-Men Character With a Single Line

X-Men: The Last Stand deserves almost no praise. Not only did it replace the franchise’s gross first director with an equally gross new director, but it utterly fumbled the Dark Phoenix Saga, one of the greatest X-Men stories of all time. Moreover, it filled the screen with all manner of deep-cut characters from the comics, with little to no relation to their four-color predecessors.

Yet, there is one exception to The Last Stand‘s mishandling of Marvel’s Merry Mutants. Jamie Madrox the Multiple Man has only one notable scene, but he’s a perfect adaptation of the B-list mutant. And all of the credit belongs to the actor who played him, the late Eric Dane.

Created by Len Wein for 1975’s Giant-Size Fantastic Four #4, Jamie Madrox is the rare mutant who has had his powers since birth, instead of manifesting them at adolescence. When his doctor slapped him on his butt start his breathing, Madrox split into two clones, revealing his ability to use kinetic energy to create dupes. As an adult, Madrox took the name Multiple Man and served as a very minor character in the X-Men milieu until the 1991 relaunch of X-Factor by writer Peter David. David reimagined Madrox as the sad clown of the superhero set, a guy whose sarcasm and cool reserve mask a deep, and ironic, loneliness.

Under David’s guidance, Multiple Man became a fan favorite. Madrox fronted the third incarnation of X-Factor, acting as the noir-ish lead detective of a private investigation firm, and in 2018 got his own time-bending, wacky miniseries, from Matthew Rosenberg and Andy MacDonald.

Madrox is exactly the type of character who should show up for a bit part in an X-Men movie, a guy with a cool power and name recognition, but who doesn’t have a Wolverine or Storm-level fan base to justify an A-plot. The Last Stand gives Madrox two scenes, and allows Dane exactly one line in each of them. And the Grey’s Anatomy star nails it.

The first is Madrox’s introduction, when Magneto rescues Mystique from a truck carrying kidnapped mutants. Before freeing Juggernaut, a great X-Men character who gets totally mishandled by the movie and is miscast as Vinnie Jones, Magneto opens a door and out walks seven Madrox duplicates. “I can use a man of your talents,” sneers Magneto, to which Multiple Man shrugs, “I’m in.”

Even better is the second scene, which mostly stays in the perspective of the war room operated by mutant hunting military man Bolivar Trask (played here by Bill Duke, and played by Peter Dinklage in X-Men: Days of Future Past, because this franchise is nuts). Through infrared satellite images, we see Trask’s soldiers descending upon a secret camp filled with mutants. But as the soldiers get closer, the people all disappear, leaving one behind. We cut to the camp, where we see that everyone there was a Multiple Man duplicate, all of whom reabsorb into Madrox Prime.

“Okay,” he says with a snarky grin and his hands raised. “I give up!”

Everything about Madrox in that scene feels like it came right out of a Peter David comic. It’s not just his costuming, the green and yellow shirt peaking out from under a leather jacket. It’s the absolutely smug way Dane delivers the line, the grin that would make you absolutely hate him if he wasn’t so darn handsome.

Nearly every other character in The Last Stand strays far from their comic book roots. Hugh Jackman plays Wolverine as a soft-hearted romantic, while Famke Janssen’s Phoenix is a generic 2000s horror monster. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen have enough presence to make even poorly-written Professor X and Magneto work, but nearly everyone who isn’t Kelsey Grammer as Beast acts nothing like the mutants we know from the pages of Marvel.

Not so with Dane’s take on Jamie Madrox. With just a shrug and a smirk and a spot-on line reading, Eric Dane did right by Multiple Man fans.