Australian scream queen Samara Weaving (Ready or Not, The Babysitter) is making her way to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) for the upcoming X-Men film reboot, where she will play the telepathic villain-turned-hero Emma Frost.
As reported by Deadline, Weaving emerged victorious among the candidates who tested for the role on 4 July and was chosen by director Jake Schreier and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. With her casting, the X-Men reboot is steadily gaining momentum, following the recent announcement that Schreier was tapped as director, alongside Lee Sung Jin (Beef) and Joanna Calo (The Bear) as scriptwriters.
With this, the MCU’s X-Men now has two powerful telepaths in its line-up (SPOILER ALERT), with Sadie Sink’s debut as Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Although it’s unclear if the two will appear on-screen together in the upcoming film, it would be interesting to see, as both have similar character arcs, first appearing as a villain before being reformed into a hero.
Emma Frost first showed up in the X-Men comics in the 1980s and was a telepathic supervillain who eventually turned good and became a key member of the X-Men. Despite her name, she doesn’t actually possess ice-based powers, and is instead able to transform her body into a durable diamond form, with her nickname, the “Ice Queen”, stemming from her initially ruthless demeanour and history as the White Queen of the Hellfire Club.
Frost has also appeared on-screen over the years, with the hero serving as the inspiration behind the character played by Tahyna Tozzi in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, although she was credited as “Kayla’s sister/Emma” in the final film. January Jones later took on the role in 2011’s X-Men: First Class, in which she was one of the film’s villains and a member of the Hellfire Club led by Kevin Bacon’s Sebastian Shaw.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
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