‘Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston Still Wants to Play Mr. Sinister in X-Men

If the X-Men franchise (or the MCU) ever wants to bring the villainous Mister Sinister to the big screen, it sounds like Walter White wants the first crack at playing him.

In the past, Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston has pointed out that he’d love the chance to portray Mister Sinister at some point, and over the years, that sentiment hasn’t changed. While speaking to ScreenGeek about SuperMansion at this year’s New York Comic Con, Cranston was once again asked about bringing a villain to life.

“I want to play an antagonist a fraction smarter than the protagonist, never dumbed down to give the hero an easy win,” the actor explained. “That’s frustrating and boring to watch.”

When Minister Sinister’s name was brought up, Cranston laughed and admitted that this was the character he had in mind all along.

“Actually, that was the character, I’ll admit,” he said. “Mister Sinister was the character I was thinking about. I guess it’s a selfish standpoint. I don’t want to do a character that has been done several times before. I don’t want to be compared like ‘well, his Commissioner Gordon was yada yada yada.’ I don’t want to do that. I want to take something that hasn’t been done.”

Cranston also brought up the idea of playing Sinister back in 2016, after X-Men: Apocalypse teased the introduction of the character.

The next X-Men movie to hit theaters, Dark Phoenix, contains a mysterious villain played by Jessica Chastain. With her character’s identity being kept in the dark, many fans thought she might be playing a female version of Sinister. However, director Simon Kinberg has shot down those theories.

“She is from, let’s say, not our planet, her character,” Kinberg said. “I’ll keep it relatively mysterious but it is a cosmic story in a way that is extraterrestrial, which is something we’ve never done in the X-Men movies before but is obviously something that is integral to the Dark Phoenix story so I felt we couldn’t do what we did on X3 and ignore that. We had to actually embrace it. So there’s a fair amount that takes place in space, and the inciting incident that starts to turn Jean, let’s say, dark and fill her with this power that she can’t control happens in space. And then there are forces from space that come to Earth because of that.”

Do you think Bryan Cranston would make a great Mister Sinister? What other comic book villains could he portray? Let us know in the comments!