Jennifer Lawrence, breakout star of the indie drama Winter’s Bone, has become the latest actor to join the cast of Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the 19 year-old Lawrence will play Mystique in the X-prequel, which starts filming in just a couple of weeks here in London.
Mystique, of course, is the shapeshifting, rather shapely evil mutant played by Rebecca Romijn in the X-Men trilogy. Although she’s the mother of Nightcrawler and a fairly significant player in the comic book universe, Mystique was very much a supporting character in the Bryan Singer/Brett Ratner films, and was ignominiously stripped of her powers early on in The Last Stand.
The casting of Lawrence, arguably the hottest young talent in Hollywood right now off the back of her stunning performance in Winter’s Bone, may indicate that Mystique plays a more important role in this movie, which charts the beginning of the rivalry between James McAvoy’s Professor X and Michael Fassbender’s Magneto, and the eventual formation of the X-Men. Let’s hope so, anyway.
So far, Vaughn hasn’t put a foot wrong in the casting of this movie, with a couple of key roles – presumably a young Cyclops (with whom Aaron Johnson has been strongly linked) and Jean Grey – to come, joining the likes of McAvoy, Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult (as Beast) and Kevin Bacon, who has just sealed a deal to play the villain of the piece. Those announcements will presumably be made at Comic-Con. That’s if the cat can be kept in the bag until then.