The latest X-Men movie suffered a significant delay in order to accommodate for reshoots, as announced this week, but there are still questions surrounding Jessica Chastain’s role in the new movie.
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A new rumor posited by Jeff Sneider on this week’s Meet the Movie Press podcast suggests the actor might be playing the classic villain Mister Sinister (or, rather, Miss Sinister) in X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which would be a major twist that would throw fans off guard.
This might sound implausible given that a story just broke about production problems on The New Mutants, which included the fact that director Josh Boone originally intended to add a stinger that revealed Jon Hamm as Mister Sinister at the end of the film.
But Sneider wrote that exact story for Tracking Board, while positing this Chastain rumor on his podcast on the same day.
Perhaps Fox was hesitant to let Boone execute his own Sinister plans, despite how much they might have lined up with that post-credits scene from X-Men: Apocalypse, because they already had plans for Sinister in X-Men: Dark Phoenix.
There have been rumors swirling around what character Chastain is playing ever since word of her potential involvement first started coming out. Industry writers speculated that she would be playing Lilandra, the leader of the Shi-ar Empire, and that Dark Phoenix would be tackling a cosmic angle in line with the comics storyline it was adapting.
And then the word came out that she will be playing Queen Veranke of the Skrull Empire, which doesn’t contradict the cosmic angle previously teased. The Skrulls are also a race of characters that 20th Century Fox can use, as well as Marvel Studios, given their appearance in Fantastic Four. Those aliens are set to appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as part of Captain Marvel, which premieres next year.
But the Skulls have never had a significant role in popular X-Men stories, much less the “Dark Phoenix Saga,” so some people doubted the validity of those rumors. It’s possible that those reports could have been put forth by Fox in order to smokescreen their true intentions of including one of the most popular X-Villains who has yet to appear on the films.
Chastain playing Miss Sinister also makes sense given the post-credits scene for Apocalypse, on which Simon Kinberg was heavily involved. Instead of setting up Logan, perhaps this was always the plan.
Either way, there’s no reason that Chastain and Hamm cannot play different versions of the character, especially given the comic book character’s penchant to clone themselves and create different versions. Then again, that would likely be pretty confusing for audiences.
We’ll see if this rumor plays out as we get closer to the debut of X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which premieres in theaters on February 14, 2019.
