After a busy three-year stretch where she seemingly appeared in a new movie every other month, Jennifer Lawrence has only popped up in three films since 2016: mother!, Red Sparrow, and Dark Phoenix. Her return to the 12th (!) installment in the X-Men series is surprising because she’s a four-time Oscar nominee (and one-time winner) — and the blue paint probably isn’t worth it anymore. But Mystique is back in Dark Phoenix (although, SPOILER ALERT, not for long) and Lawrence had only one major condition to reprise the part.
“We presumed the First Class core cast — [Michael] Fassbender, [James] McAvoy, Jennifer, and Nic [Hoult] were coming back for this film,” director Simon Kinberg told the Hollywood Reporter. “Part of the reason I presumed that was at the end of finishing X-Men: Apocalypse, when it was clear Bryan Singer was not going to direct the next movie, it was the actors that approached me about directing the next of the X-Men movies. Jen said she wouldn’t come back for another movie unless I directed it. So, I had a lot of support from them.”
Singer, who has been accused of engaging in sexual misconduct with underage males, directed Lawrence in Days of Future Past and Apocalypse before Kinberg took over for his directorial debut. Lawrence has previously said shooting Dark Phoenix was “fun with no chaos,” unlike previous films which were “fun amidst chaos,” while Sophie Turner (Jean Grey) called working for Singer “unpleasant.”
X-Men: Dark Phoenix opens later this week.
(Via the Hollywood Reporter)