The New Mutants Sunspot Actor Teases Bromance With Cannonball

After years in limbo, The New Mutants hits theaters today, hoping to be one of the highest-profile releases of the summer movie season so far (with a number of other recent films, including this week’s Bill and Ted Face the Music, effectively blackballed by major theater chains for doing a day-and-date digital release for the fans in states with no open theaters). The movie, which is loosely adapted from the original (read: pre-Liefeld) run of the comic by the same name, centers on a group of young mutants who are discovering their powers in a more frightening and traumatizing way than fans are used to seeing in an X-Men movie.

Among the relationships that the film gets to explore is the “bromance” between Sunspot and Cannonball, a pair of characters who are well known to comic book fans but significantly less familiar (at least until now) with the moviegoing audience.

“Sunspot has a bromance, man, he and Sam are really tight,” actor Henry Zaga told Comic Book Movie. “They’re incredibly different, but they know each other on a deeper level, I think that Sam knows that Roberto comes from a good place, even when he’s being a dick. He doesn’t want to be a dick, he’s traumatized too, and there’s so much more to him than the surface-level, jokester front he puts up.”

“He’s a guy that really just needs a friend and I think Sam does that really well,” Zaga continued. “He’s a great friend to Roberto. There’s a line that I love in the movie that when Sam gives me the go, he goes ‘Nut up ‘Berto!,’ and it’s finally when you see me become Sunspot. That was one of the most rewarding relationships for me to play, outside of growing even closer to Josh, Charlie and I have become such great friends, he’s a wonderful actor and person, and it was like Sam and Roberto’s relationship bleeding into real life.”

The film, which was originally slated to be released in 2018, has been rescheduled numerous times even before the coronavirus pandemic shut down theaters in March. Since then, it got bumped a little more, but Disney seemed finally set on actually getting the film out in cinemas.

The New Mutants also stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams, Charlie Heaton, Blu Hunt, and more. The film is now in theaters, with no word yet on when it will hit home video and reports suggesting that it might get one of the more traditional release windows of 2020, meaning about a 3-month wait for those who can’t or won’t go to cinema.