If the embed won’t play, the interview is also here on YouTube.
Kevin Feige has spent years trying to recruit Adam Driver into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and by the Marvel boss’s own account it had become something of a ritual. Feige would get on a Zoom call, offer a part, Driver would go away and think about it for a few days, and then politely say no. On Thursday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Driver confirmed the routine was real, and explained why it finally broke. The answer was the X-Men, and a cousin called Tony.
Driver told Kimmel he was a big X-Men fan as a boy, the animated series having arrived bang on time for his generation. He and cousin Tony used to play the characters, with Driver as Wolverine and Tony as Sabretooth, which tells you all you need to know about who got first pick. Asked whether Tony had swayed his decision, Driver deadpanned that they no longer speak, before conceding that there’s “drama between us” and then, to everyone’s relief, that he loves his cousin. Sabretooth has been holding a grudge against Wolverine since the 1980s, so Tony is at least in character.
The more serious answer was the package: the X-Men themselves, director Jake Schreier’s idea for the film, and Feige. Driver also admitted to some nerves, pointing out that an awful lot of people watch these films, so if he’s bad, an awful lot of people will see him being bad. “I don’t want to mess it up,” he said. It’s an unusually candid admission from an actor whose villain CV already includes a man who smashed up his own control panels when meetings went badly.
The role was announced at D23 in August, when Driver appeared by video and introduced himself only as Nathaniel Milbury. Comic readers knew at once who that was. Milbury is one of the many aliases of Nathaniel Essex, the Victorian geneticist better known as Mister Sinister, created by Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri and first seen in full in The Uncanny X-Men #221 in 1987. Sinister is the pale fellow with the red diamond in his forehead, a cape with collars sharp enough to perform surgery, and an unhealthy fixation on the Summers family bloodline. Fox teased him at the end of X-Men: Apocalypse in 2016 and then never got round to him, which makes this his first live-action appearance proper. He also keeps spare cloned bodies on hand in case the current one gets damaged, which is the sort of contingency planning Kylo Ren could have used.
Schreier’s X-Men reaches cinemas on 5 May 2028, with Sadie Sink as Jean Grey, Kit Connor as Cyclops, Christopher Abbott as Professor X, Samara Weaving as Emma Frost, Inde Navarrette as Rogue and Maya Boyd as Storm. As a geneticist obsessed with Scott and Jean, Sinister will no doubt have strong views on that casting. Somewhere in America, meanwhile, a grown man called Tony is presumably still muttering that he should have been Wolverine.
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