X-Men: Apocalypse - Psylocke Replaced This Character As The Final Horseman

Apocalypse was very close to having just three horsemen in his upcoming film.

The trailers for X-Men: Apocalypse have spotlighted just how deadly Psylocke can be, but the original draft of the script did not contain the powerful warrior. In an interview with Cinema Blend, Writer and Producer Simon Kinberg spoke about how the original idea included Professor X.

"The one person we didn't know was Psylocke, and the reason why is because originally in the script we sort of… I don't know why we made this decision, but we knew that Professor X was abducted in the middle of the movie, and we thought that almost counted as a fourth Horseman. And so that's the way we constructed the original draft of the script. There wasn't going to be a fourth one. The 'surprise' was that Xavier was the fourth Horseman. And then when we were working on the script, Bryan and I at one particular point – pretty late in the process – said, 'He's not really a Horseman – he's not doing anything in the third act of the movie."

After those conversations spurred on the addition of a true fourth horseman, they looked at all the possible options and landed on Psylocke being an intriguing choice. Fortunately for Kinberg, he had recently met with actress Olivia Munn and thought she might be great in the role.

"We started talking about who that would be, and just literally looked at the list of different Horsemen over the history of the comics, and Psylocke was the one we thought was the most intriguing. And, ironically, or as fate would have it, I had just met with Olivia Munn about Deadpool - like a week or two before. And Bryan and I were up in Montreal, and I said, 'You know, Olivia Munn could be an interesting Psylocke,' so we went on the internet and Googled her images. And one of the first things that popped up was a piece of fan art of Olivia as Psylocke."

All of this took place relatively quickly, but it was cutting it close. Munn signed on in April of 2015, the same month the film started filming. After seeing her in action, it looks like they made the right choice.