Women of X-M take comm
P ardon our political correctness, but shouldn’t “X-Men: Apocalypse” really be “X-Persons: Apocalypse”?
“X-People,” corrected Alexandra Shipp (“Straight Outta Compton”), who plays Ororo Munroe/Storm, the younger version of the character previously played by Halle Berry. “I love it.”
After 16 years of a hugely successful, surprisingly intelligent, action-packed mutant franchise — one that has featured among its cast members, besides Berry, Anna Paquin, Rebecca Romjin, Famke Janssen, Olivia Williams, Ellen Page, Rose Byrne and, of course, Jennifer Lawrence — couldn’t there be a little accommodation in the title?
Ah, well, branding is
Apocalypse. Professor Xavier ( James McAvoy), namesake of the X-Men, is engaged in a fight for the future of the planet. The game, as they say, is afoot.
Despite all the supe-rmutant testosterone, the female X-ers seem key. “Apocalypse” marks director Bryan Singer’s fourth trip to X-Ville and the third in which the storyline has flashed back, enabling younger actors — Lawrence, for instance, who stepped into the Raven/ Mystique role originated by Romjin — to join in.
Alongside Lawrence are Olivia Munn, who has taken over the Betsy Braddock/Psylocke role (Meiling Melancon played her in “Last Stand”); Sophie Turner, who inhabits the Jean Grey/Phoenix character once played by Janssen; and Shipp as Storm, the role that once turned Berry moody and blue.
“The way Halle played Storm, she was always so controlled and poised and knew exactly what she was doing,” said Shipp, 24. “I wanted to find out where that came from. I know what I was like when I was 16; I was a know-it-all and so sure of myself, and I bring some of that to Storm.”
She compared “X-Men: Apocalypse” in some ways to “Survivor,” in that everyone has an important role in the plot twists and the outcomes. “It’s really that everyone is essential,” she said, agreeing that there is a surfeit of strong women in the kind of movie — a Marvel movie — in which you don’t always find them.
Shipp is a singer-songwriter and actress and is just one of the multitalents emerging on the X train. Turner, a veteran of “Game of Thrones,” will be playing novelist Mary Shelley in the upcoming biopic “Mary Shelley’s Monster.” Munn, a correspondent on “The Daily Show” from 2010-11, seems to be the real fan among the “X-Men” cast and a defender of her character’s place in the pantheon.
“Have you read the comic books?” she said. “The films are the choices of people in Hollywood and the studios and what stories they’ll do, and what they’ll pull out. But the comic-book Psylocke has always been my favorite. She’s a really strong character. For fans who love the comic books, she’s always been important.”
Psylocke, who becomes one of the mutant “four horsemen” to align with Apocalypse, required a lot of physical investment on Munn’s part. “It was definitely very exciting to see how far I could push myself,” she said. “I always thought I was in good shape, and then I started training for this movie and realized how out of shape I was.”
It was good, Munn said, not having had “a big movie star who played my character before, like Famke Janssen, or Halle Berry, or James Marsden — there’s a lot of big stars who’ve put their imprint on the characters. So that was one advantage I had. But I’ve been a fan since I was a little kid, so in bringing Psylocke to the screen there were other pressures — knowing how unusual she is and wanting to do her justice and being a fan. How do I see her? How do other fans see her? I had to work through that.”
And the importance of the women to “X-Men: Apocalypse,” she said, should not be underestimated. “It’s important to realize the power that the women hold in this movie and how great it is,” she said. “And how much damage it can cause.”