Olivia Munn Originally Auditioned For A Deadpool Movie Role

Olivia Munn is set to show off her psychic ninja skills as Psylocke in X-Men: Apocalypse, but she came into the role in a rather roundabout way.

X-Men: Apocalypse writer Simon Kinberg revealed during a set visit (via Collider) that Psylocke was a late addition to the film’s cast. He had first met Munn during auditions for Deadpool:

“Psylocke was quite a late addition to the script and the movie. Bryan Singer and I were up here in Montreal and we felt like we needed a different Horseman, and we just started going through the cycling of the different Apocalypse Horsemen over history. We felt like we wanted it to be a female character and we pretty quickly settled on Psylocke. And super randomly I think a week or two earlier I was in Los Angeles and we were casting Deadpool. I had met with Olivia Munn for a character in Deadpool that ultimately wasn’t the right character for her, but we were like ‘We’ve gotta keep in touch, she has to do something in the X-Men world.’ And Bryan and I were sitting in Montreal a few weeks later and saying we should do Psylocke and I was like, ‘Dude, I just met with Olivia Munn two weeks ago. She’d be great.’ Then we looked at pictures of her online and I emailed her and I said, ‘I think this is a great character for you’ and she immediately emailed me back and sent me all this fan art online that fans had done of her as Psylocke. So that’s how that one came to be.”

Kinberg didn’t specify which character Munn had tried out for in Deadpool. If I had to make a guess, I would think it was Vanessa Carlyle, the love interest role that was ultimately taken by Morena Baccarin, as Munn seems a bit old to play Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and a bit slight for Angel Dust.

Check out when X-Men: Apocalypse, Deadpool and other movies are coming out in ComicBook.com’s Movie Release Schedule.