James McAvoy has now played iconic X-Men patriarch Charles Xavier twice on film, but the actor has managed to keep his head of hair intact throughout both X-Men: First Class and this year’s X-Men: Days of Future Past. That’s a surprising feat given that the character has traditionally been bald both in comics and previous films. However, according to McAvoy himself, his days of sporting luscious locks while playing the telepath may finally be behind him.
While promoting his next film, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, McAvoy was asked by The Huffington Post about the next installment in the franchise, X-Men: Apocalypse. The actor admits that he doesn’t know many details about it yet, as things are still being kept under wraps, but he does talk a bit about his hair situation:
“I’ll be older in this one. I think I’m losing my hair finally. And yeah, that’s kind of all I know. I got an email from [producer/writer] Simon Kinberg who informed me he was getting dead excited about stuff, but he didn’t want to divulge anything for a couple of weeks, so I really don’t know.”
As immaterial as the state of McAvoy’s hair may at first seem to the film’s proceedings, the fact that he may be going bald in the next installment is actually rather telling. McAvoy’s Xavier is much different than Patrick Stewart’s, and not just because of their age difference. As it turns out, Xavier wasn’t always the benevolent, selfless man that Stewart played in the first three X-Men films. He struggled with a bit of an ego in his youth, though he has gone through quite a lot of character development since his first “younger” appearance in First Class. He’s matured and grown a lot throughout two films, and McAvoy is likely to play a version of the character even closer to Stewart’s in Apocalypse. That he may look like him too is a nice way for the filmmakers to communicate that change visually.
X-Men: Apocalypse will begin filming in Montreal in the spring of next year, and the blockbuster won’t hit theaters until May 27th, 2016. That means we’re still quite a ways away from learning any concrete details about it, but these little character updates should tide us over for now.
