X-Men ’97 Star Breaks Silence on “Magneto Is Right” Moment

We’re nearing the end of the first season of X-Men ’97, but the Marvel Animation series is expected to deliver some bombshells along the way. The series’ latest episode, “Tolerance Is Extinction — Part 1”, culminated in Val Cooper (Catherine Disher) freeing Magneto (Matthew Waterson) from his imprisonment in Bastion’s (Theo James) evil lair, flat-out admitting that she now realizes “Magneto Is Right.” The moment then culminated in Magneto traveling to the North Pole and using his powers to send a shockwave throughout the Earth, which helped the X-Men in their global fight against the Sentinels. In an exclusive interview with ComicBook’s Phase Zero podcast, Waterson shared his reaction to that moment, as well as his excitement for how the “Tolerance Is Extinction” arc continues from here.

“One of the really, really nice things has been — I get the scripts that I’m in, and a lot of the time, I’ve not necessarily spent a huge amount of time focusing on parts of scripts that are not the bits that I’m responsible for working on, and making come alive,” Waterson revealed in our interview. “So one of the really fun things about the show airing has been being able to see the episodes that I didn’t even read the scripts for, so I didn’t know what was happening, and then being able to see the scripts that I did read actually fully realized. Knowing what it’s been building to throughout the first seven episodes, and knowing these last three, how the whole thing comes to a head and wraps up, one of the things that I was really looking forward to was ‘Okay, what does it actually look like, once Magneto has found himself in this situation he finds himself in, for the majority of this episode?’ And then, ‘When he does get loose, what does that choice of his actually, visually, look like? What does it look like when he decides to do that?’ Because there are a million ways you can do it. Being able to see how they did it, and how they sort of visually represented it, was really, really cool.” 

“I don’t know if production would describe it this way, but to me, these last three episodes exist almost as a feature, in and of themselves,” Waterson continued. “So this first one is like Act One — you have the big incident that switches you into the second act of the story, and there’s a couple of things that are a part of that. But Bastion’s activities, and then, Magneto’s response, and then, getting everybody finally in the same geographical place. So it’s like, ‘Okay, all the players are now on the board, and literally on the board. They’re not scattered to the four winds. Everybody is in position, now how do we solve this? Because this is going to be a really complicated Rubik’s Cube.’”

Is X-Men ’97 Renewed for Season 2?

Work has already begun on a sophomore season of X-Men ’97, which was already renewed by Marvel Animation prior to the show’s premiere.

“We’re working on season two. But we haven’t started yet. I know a little bit of the storylines and characters,” co-composer Taylor Newton Stewart explained in a recent interview. “It’s always upping the ante. I mean, it’s pretty intense what happens. Yeah, immediately when I was told, I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s happening? This is incredible.’ So, just as a fan alone, I am very excited.”

New episodes of X-Men ’97 debut on Wednesdays exclusively on Disney+. If you haven’t signed up for Disney+ yet, you can try it out here.