New 'X-Men: Dark Phoenix' Image Shows Jessica Chastain In Control

The X-Men are set to face their biggest threat yet when Jean Grey embraces her powers in Dark [...]

By Joe Schmidt

The X-Men are set to face their biggest threat yet when Jean Grey embraces her powers in Dark Phoenix, with the fate of the planet — and possibly the universe — at stake.

A brand new photo hints at the film's storyline, indicating that Jean Grey might not be the biggest threat in X-Men: Dark Phoenix. Instead, it could be Jessica Chastain's mysterious character. Take a look below:

Speculation has run rampant over Chastain's character, with some people thinking she's playing Lilandra of the Shi'ar, Queen Veranke of the Skrulls, or even Lady Mastermind of the Hellfire Club.

Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg made it clear that Chastain's character is an alien, though he refused to offer much more.

"I can tease that she is not of this world, that she is an extraterrestrial character. I can tease that she does some pretty wonderful things with it," Kinberg said to Collider. "Beyond that, in terms of where she comes from specifically in our universe and what she's based on in the comics, I guess I will say she's sort of an amalgam of a couple different characters and iterations of those characters over the span of the different tellings of the Dark Phoenix story that have taken place."

Though she's not going to be playing Lady Mastermind or even a gender-swapped version of the original Mastermind, Kinberg said that Chastain's character would be influenced by the classic X-Men villain.

"I will say that Jessica's character is not Mastermind but there are elements of the way Mastermind manipulates Jean that Jessica's character does employ," Kinberg explained. "For me, as you'll see, that Jessica's character has elements of a few different characters from the comics.

"She is from, let's say, not our planet, her character. 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."

Fans will find out who the award winning-actress is playing when Dark Phoenix premieres in theaters on June 7th.

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