Dark Phoenix Director Dishes On Jessica Chastain’s Villain, New Pics Debut

If last week belonged to Captain Marvel and Brie Larson’s Kree super-soldier, then the past 24 hours have been all about X-Men: Dark Phoenix and its own overpowered lead.

But whereas Carol Danvers is expected to become the Avengers’ latest recruit, the advent of Dark Phoenix and, more specifically, Jean Grey’s radical transformation thrusts a wedge between the X-Men, as Charles Xavier and Co. begin to wage a war with one of their own.

The fallout, as you can expect, is devastating, and there’s even evidence to suggest that Simon Kinberg and his writing team are about to introduce a major twist into the X-timeline. Whatever the case, while discussing his 2019 epic with IGN, Kinberg did shed some light on Jessica Chastain’s mystery villain, whom he describes as an amalgamation of “a few different characters from the comics.”

I will say that Jessica’s character is not Mastermind but there are elements of the way Mastermind manipulates Jean that Jessica’s character does employ. For me, as you’ll see, that Jessica’s character has elements of a few different characters from the comics.

The fact that the filmmaker mentions Mastermind by name is a pretty clear indication that Chastain’s big bad will be able to mess with Jean’s already fragile emotions (see above). But when pressed on the exact identity of her villain, Simon Kinberg refused to be drawn on the specifics…

She is from, let’s say, not our planet, her character. I’ll keep it relatively mysterious but it is a cosmic story in a way that is extraterrestrial, which is something we’ve never done in the X-Men movies before but is obviously something that is integral to the Dark Phoenix story so I felt we couldn’t’ do what we did on X3 and ignore that. We had to actually embrace it. So there’s a fair amount that takes place in space, and the inciting incident that starts to turn Jean, let’s say, dark and fill her with this power that she can’t control happens in space. And then there are forces from space that come to Earth because of that.

All will be revealed when X-Men: Dark Phoenix lights up theaters on February 14th, 2019.