X-MEN: AGE OF APOCALYPSE Adds to Cast
For a few weeks now, we’ve been hearing that three of the main X-Men team would be re-cast with younger actors for the upcoming X-Men: Age of Apocalypse. Director Bryan Singer has made the casting announcement via Twitter:
https://twitter.com/BryanSinger/status/558437540831567872
Sophie Turner, who’s made her mark as Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones, will play Jean Grey. Alexandra Shipp (House of Anubis, Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B) will play Storm. Tye Sheridan (Mud, ABC’s Last Man Standing) will take over the role of Scott “Cyclops” Summers.
The report in Variety says Sheridan was an early favorite for Singer, who’s been in the casting process for the last few weeks. Age of Apocalypse takes place during the 1980s in the new timeline established in Days of Future Past, and requires younger actors for these particular X-Men. Famke Jannsen, Halle Berry, and James Marsden played the parts previously.
Genre enthusiasts can see Turner in the upcoming Mary Shelley’s Monster, playing the famed Frankenstein author.
Oscar Isaac will play the titular villain. The film continues the trend of adapting existing stories from the comic books, following The Wolverine and Days of Future Past. Age of Apocalypse is based on a story arc from 1995-1996, in which Professor Xavier is killed protecting Magneto from an attack by a time-traveling Legion, thus establishing a new history in which Magneto is the champion of mutant-human relations. In this timeline, the first mutant Apocalypse launches an attack to take over Earth (later retconned from Earth-616 to Earth-295).
No word on how faithfully the movie will adapt the comic story, but it’s likely Singer will take liberties as he did with DOFP. But the introduction of Apocalypse opens up possibilities for other characters such as Cable and X-Force to enter the story universe, and writer Simon Kinberg has already acknowledged that Deadpool lives in the same universe managed by 20th Century Fox.
X-Men: Age of Apocalypse opens May 27, 2016.
