Marvel's X-Men Reboot Has a Casting Trend Horror Fans Will Love

If the gnarlier tone of Spider-Man: Brand New Day wasn’t enough to get horror fans excited for the MCU's X-Men reboot, the casting decisions and rumours we've been seeing certainly will. 

In Brand New Day, we were introduced to Jean Grey, with Sadie Sink becoming the first official X-Men cast member to be introduced to the MCU.

Since then, nearly every concrete announcement and credible piece of hearsay that's surfaced so far has been to do with an actor with ties to horror cinema. Long may this continue.

The Horror Icons Already Involved In The MCU’s Upcoming X-Men Reboot

When Brand New Day was released in late July and Hollywood’s sort-of best kept secret was finally revealed, it was finally time to ink the first name onto our X-Men casting wall chart. That name, of course, was Sadie Sink — one of the breakout stars of the later seasons of Stranger Things, a show that's been providing younger audiences with a gateway to horror fandom ever since it first started airing on Netflix a decade ago. 

Sink is, of course, set to play Jean Grey in the franchise for the foreseeable future, a character who we already know is one of the most powerful in the comics, but one whose abilities have not been explored in quite as creepy a way as they were in Brand New Day; the manner in which she jumped through people's minds when fleeing a scene felt like an eerily organic update on the T1000. Then, there was the Obsession-coded sequence in which she pretended to be MJ just to mess with Peter Parker’s already stressed out mind — so mean. 

Soon after that Spidey release, Sink was joined in the cast by Samara Weaving, a bonafide Aussie Scream Queen who has been admirably plying her trade as a horror actress for over a decade now in movies like The Babysitter, Ready or Not and Scream VI. For X-Men, Weaving is set to play the ice queen Emma Frost, a role which January Jones took on briefly back in X-Men: First Class. We can expect Weaving to give the role a different spin.

The only other confirmed casting (at time of writing) is Kit Connor as Scott Summers/Cyclops, and while the baby-faced star of Neflix’s Heartstopper doesn’t quite square with our overall theory here, Conn0r did appear in the British horror comedy movie Slaughterhouse Rulez — and no, I haven’t seen it either. 

…And The Spooky Rumours

Now for the juicier stuff. First up on our round-up of horror-coded rumours is Bill Skarsgård, the wild-eyed Swedish star of It and Nosferatu and an actor who, if reports are to be believed, might be gearing up to play Charles Xavier — a famously gentlemanly genius — in the upcoming reboot.

Another that seems quite likely is Beef’s Cailee Spaeny (X-Men is currently being written by that show’s creator, Lee Sung Jin), who, regardless of what you thought of Alien: Romulus as a whole, certainly helped to bring that franchise back to its slasher-in-space origins. She was also a perfect stand-in for Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley — who was, left we forget, one of cinema's first final girls. 

The Spaeny rumours have come on the back of solid word that Charles Melton (her Beef co-star and an American Horror Story alum) was being lined up to play Hank McCoy/Beast — although it's reported he may have passed on the role now. A less likely rumour doing the rounds is that Inde Navarrette is being considered for the role of Mystique — which would make perfect sense for the shapeshifting Obsession stars, even if it feels more like fan casting at this point. 

More likely, due to her connection to Ryan Coogler, is Jayme Lawson for Storm — an actress who we last saw on-screen as a vampire, perishing in the sunlight at the end of Coogler’s Sinners last year. With all that in mind, we could be set for the creepiest X-Men movie yet.