Marvel Studios has cast its first mutant. Samara Weaving will play Emma Frost in the X-Men reboot, according to Deadline, making her the first actor attached to a film that has spent two years as pure speculation.
It is worth noting up front that Marvel has not announced this. The studio declined to comment when asked, so this is trade reporting rather than an official confirmation, and it arrives days after a Comic-Con that passed without a single mutant announcement.
Everyone Guessed Wrong
The interesting part is how badly the rumor mill missed. For months, the name attached to Emma Frost was Sydney Sweeney, later joined by Margot Robbie, both sourced to the same scooper account rather than to any trade. Neither got the part. It is a useful reminder of how little those reports are worth: the actual answer came from an audition process nobody was reporting on.
That process was apparently exhaustive. Deadline reports that director Jake Schreier and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige spent the summer meeting actors for several mutant roles, and that Emma was the one they went deepest on. A shortlist tested one final time shortly after the July 4 weekend, and Weaving won it on the audition.
Weaving is best known for the horror comedy Ready or Not and its sequel, along with Guns Akimbo and Babylon.
Who Emma Frost Is
Created by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, Emma Frost debuted in The Uncanny X-Men #129 in January 1980 as the White Queen of the Hellfire Club’s Inner Circle, an outright villain with formidable telepathy and the ability to turn her body into organic diamond. She later ran the Massachusetts Academy as a rival to Xavier’s school, teaching her own class of young mutants, before joining the X-Men and becoming one of the team’s most prominent leaders.
Which version the film uses is unknown, and the character works either way. She has been on screen before: January Jones played her in X-Men: First Class, Tahyna Tozzi appeared as a version in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Finola Hughes played her in the 1996 Generation X television pilot.
Seven Years After The Rights Came Home
Disney acquired the X-Men film rights through the 2019 purchase of 21st Century Fox. Rather than rebooting immediately, Marvel spent years easing mutants into the Marvel Cinematic Universe while revisiting the Fox era, most visibly through the returning cast of Avengers: Doomsday, which brings back James Marsden as Cyclops alongside Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen this December.
Schreier, who directed Thunderbolts, is helming the reboot from a script by Lee Sung Jin and Joanna Calo. The film remains in early development with no release date.
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