The X-Men cast is no longer a rumor mill. Kevin Feige closed Marvel’s portion of Friday’s Disney Entertainment Showcase at D23 by putting the team on stage: Sadie Sink as Jean Grey, Kit Connor as Cyclops, Samara Weaving as Emma Frost, Christopher Abbott as Professor X, Inde Navarrette as Rogue, and Maya Boyd as Storm, with Adam Driver appearing by video as the villainous Mister Sinister. The film lands exclusively in theaters on May 5, 2028, with Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier at the helm.
Two Brand New Names Lead The Reveal
Most of the lineup had leaked out in pieces over the past month. Sink’s Jean Grey debuted on screen in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and Connor and Weaving were reported ahead of the showcase, a story we covered when Weaving’s casting killed months of wrong guesses. The genuine surprises were Storm and Professor X. Boyd comes from Broadway, where she led & Juliet, and steps into a role Halle Berry defined across four Fox films. Abbott, a Tony nominee this year for Death of a Salesman, broke through on Girls and takes over a part played by Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy.
Adam Driver Finally Joins The MCU As Mister Sinister
Driver beamed in by video and toyed with the crowd, initially claiming he would be playing Magneto before correcting himself to Nathaniel Milbury, an alias of Mister Sinister in the comics. He said he and Feige had been talking for years about the right entry point and had found characters he feels deeply about. Navarrette, this summer’s breakout from Obsession, rounds out the announced mutants as Rogue.
More Casting Is Still Coming
Feige said more X-Men casting news is on the way, calling this the first group he could not wait to introduce, and noted many of the actors met each other backstage at D23 for the first time. The full cast list and date are on Marvel.com.
The passing of the torch has already started outside the film too. In the days after the reveal, X-Men ’97 voice actors publicly welcomed their live action counterparts, with Alison Sealy-Smith, the animated series’ Storm, congratulating Boyd, and Lenore Zann, who has voiced Rogue since the 1990s, sending her congratulations to Navarrette. For a fanbase that treats the animated series as canon in its own right, the endorsements carry weight.
The stakes are hard to overstate. The X-Men have not assembled on screen since Fox’s Dark Phoenix in 2019, and this film marks the team’s first true Marvel Studios era launch following Avengers: Secret Wars. By Sunday the new cast was already being folded into the family, appearing together at the convention while Downey welcomed them aboard, and the film instantly becomes the anchor of Marvel’s post Secret Wars slate. Between Sink’s head start in a two billion dollar Spider-Man film and a villain of Driver’s caliber, Marvel is treating its mutants as the main event.
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