Our favorite teleporting mutant is making a return to the X-Men movies, but Alan Cumming will not be returning for the role. Instead, we’ll be seeing a young version of the character played by Kodi Smit-McPhee.
X-Men: Apocalypse director Bryan Singer revealed the news on Instagram:
Who’s that?
Smit-McPhee hasn’t been acting for all that long (he’s only 18 after all), but in his short career he’s managed to pick up some huge roles. In the past five years he’s starred in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Let Me In, The Road, and provided the voice for Norman in ParaNorman.
Sounds super talented, do we know anything about how he’ll fit into the movie?
So far we don’t know anything for sure beyond the fact that he’ll be in Apocalypse next year, but the fact that the character is making an appearance does raise some questions.
Namely, in the original trilogy of films, Professor X and crew didn’t meet Nightcrawler until the events of X2. That means that whatever time travel shenanigans went down in Days of Future Past really messed with the overall timeline, and are somehow leading to Apocalypse’s arrival in the next movie.
Does this mean the time travel created a new, parallel timeline? Or are we rewriting X-Men history with these upcoming movies? The former option makes a little bit more sense given the rumors of a Wolverine sequel, but it gets a little bit messy once you factor in that “happy future” scene at the end of Days of Future Past.
So basically, the X-Men movies don’t really care about continuity at this point?
Yeah more or less. At the very least, now we might finally get confirmation of whether or not Nightcrawler is Mystique and Azazel’s kid.
