When you end up writing about rumors and stuff with movies, especially big budget, comic book extravaganzas like the X-Men series, it is easy to get carried away. Do it enough and people surely start to believe that you are some frothy-mouthed fan boy camping out to buy adult sized Underoos.
That’s why I want to get out here and say that I think this rumor is bogus. Flat out bogus. And I have a good reason why I believe that, which we will get to in a minute.
It comes from Indiewire via the Meet The Movie Press YouTube show and it concerns who is playing Apocalypse in the next X-Men film. There was talk about Tom Hardy here recently, but it would seem that those rumors have been replaced by someone else. Someone who said “apocalypse” on film a lot in recent films. Someone like Idris Elba. From IndieWire:
In the most recent episode, Sneider calls in with a little scoop, but doesn’t name names. He states that there are actors he’s heard, who are in contention for the part of Apocalypse, but doesn’t say who the actors are, and instead only drops the following hint, regarding one of the actors: “We heard him say the word ‘apocalypse’ a lot last year.”
That’s it! Although, if you’re a movie fanboy/girl, you may consider it a pretty good hint; it’s not like there were many movies (specifically mainstream movies) in which there were characters using that word in 2013, were they? However, I couldn’t immediately come up with any name… that is, until I browsed through the top 100 grossing films of 2013, to see if anything comes to me, and the only one that fit the bill was Idris Elba as Stacker Pentecost in Guillermo del Toro’s “Pacific Rim.”
That clip is queued up below and it is literally just what the quote says. Like a friend saying they have a secret about you, but they can’t say what it is. You’re left assuming it is because someone has put an enchantment on their tongue or a demon has threatened their life if they speak the actual words behind the secret.
Well I’m here to say bullsh*t. And even if it this turns out to be true, there’s still a smell of bullsh*t in the air. It’s just coming from a different direction.
I point you back to the beginning of the month, a moment when Idris Elba was talking about his role in Marvel’s Thor and how the entire thing was torture compared to his turn as Nelson Mandela. Here’s a longer quote from that Telegraph interview:
“Mmm. Yeah. I mean, I didn’t quite shake it off.” It seems he didn’t have the chance. “It was really weird,” he begins. “I’d just done eight months in South Africa. I came to England and the day I came back I had to do reshoots on Thor 2.” He raises an eyebrow. “And in the actual scene my hair was different, my…” He stops and gives an exasperated sigh. “I was like, ‘This is torture, man. I don’t want to do this.’ My agent said: ‘You have to, it’s part of the deal.’ ”
In the scene in question in the superhero movie, “I’m actually falling down from a spaceship, so they had to put me in harness in this green-screen studio. And in between takes I was stuck there, fake hair stuck on to my head with glue, this f—— helmet, while they reset. And I’m thinking: ‘24 hours ago, I was Mandela’. When I walked into the set the extras called me Madiba. I was literally walking in this man’s boots. [Within] six months, the crew, we were all so in love with this film we had made. I was him. I was Mandela, practically,” he insists.
“Then there I was, in this stupid harness, with this wig and this sword and these contact lenses. It ripped my heart out.”
So a guy who just called this superhero stuff “torture” is in talks to play the main villain in another superhero franchise? He’s not even a main character in Thor 2 and now he’s attached to possibly play the big bad in X-Men: Apocalypse, A movie where he will most likely have to pretend to shoot things from his hands or build a pyramid with his mind powers. The whole thing just leaves me thinking that someone isn’t telling the truth.
Fox must pay really, really well if this all turns into a fact. Like Scrooge McDuck amounts of money.
(Via Meet The Movie Press / Indie Wire)
