Legion Star Dan Stevens Reflects on X-Men Series Finale

It’s been over a year since the end of Marvel’s X-Men series Legion wrapped up it’s critically-acclaimed run on FX, showing the journey of David Haller as he discovered his mutant abilities amid an ongoing feud between his birth father Charles Xavier and the malevolent entity Amahl Farouk AKA the Shadow King. Now series star Dan Stevens is opening up about his time in the Marvel Universe and the series ending, which takes the character that seemed to be destined for villainy and instead gives him a fresh start unencumbered by the influences that drove him mad.

During an interview with Collider, Stevens opened up about his time on Legion. The actor spoke about the finale and how it fit into showrunner Noah Hawley’s vision of the series.

“What was lovely about that was that it was pretty much how Noah had envisaged the whole thing. I know people want shows to run for like 27 years, but it just is not feasible,” Stevens said. “It’s not good, generally. It’s not interesting. And actually, if somebody has a three season arc, which is a story, it’s a beginning, middle and end. You’re not in some sort of endless open-ended thing. That was the ending as described to me. We’d go from cradle through the astral plane back to cradle, and yeah, I really liked the shape of that.”

Legion was praised for the intricacies of the sets, the costumes, the camera work, and the many dance sequences that popped up throughout every episode. But being a weekly show that ran for three seasons, there were many different challenges that the cast and crew had to take on n order to make the show.

Stevens spoke at length about the people involved with making Legion happen. In his praise, he recognized how special the series was because of the people involved.

“As somebody who is passionate about filmmaking, as an actor, I get really excited being in cool shots,” Stevens said. “So when you’re working with whether it’s Dana Gonzales or Polly Morgan, who are our two incredible DPs on that show, and we had this incredible operator who’s worth a mention, he’s called Mitch Dubin, and he’s been Spielberg’s operator for 20 years I’d say. I mean, he’s done everything. And there were still days on Legion where he would look up from the lens and be like, “Wow, I’ve never seen that before.” And I thought that was just amazing. To surprise a guy like that, to keep a guy like that on his toes, the passion from behind the lens really… It spreads through the whole set, I think, and yeah, there were some really crazy stuff that we were doing and those guys have been rightly recognized for that I hope.”

All episodes of Legion are currently streaming on FX on Hulu.