When it was announced the Kick-Ass team of director Matthew Vaughn and scriptwriter Jane Goldman were to take charge over the Bryan Singer produced X-Men: First Class reboot it was seen as a bold and exciting move, and with a scheduled release date of the 3rd of June, 2011 there clearly wasn’t much time to waste.
Today brings the good news that the first piece of casting has been completed and it’s one of the main parts in this origin story of the X-Men – James McAvoy has been cast in the role of Professor X. McAvoy will be known to many as the guy from the Bendy Bullet movie Wanted, but here in the UK his work on TV in Shameless and the original State of Play mini series was an impressive start to a career which also saw his rise to the challenge of embodying one of Ian McEwan’s leads in Joe Wright’s Atonement.
Here’s what THR had to offer,
“First Class” will “chart the epic beginning of the X-Men saga. Before Charles Xavier and Eric Lensherr took the names Professor X and Magneto, they were two young men discovering their powers for the first time.
Before they were archenemies, they were the closest of friends, working together, with other Mutants (some familiar, some new), to stop the greatest threat the world has ever known. In the process, a rift between them opened, which began the eternal war between Magneto’s Brotherhood and Professor X’s X-Men.”
I kind of love the word archenemy – it doesn’t get used enough. Anyhoo, that’s the set up, and far from being the X-Men Junior High it seems First Class will focus on the compelling relationship between Xavier and Lensherr – so, the next question is – who will play Magneto?
