It's official - Bryan Singer has confirmed exclusively to Empire that Angel will be in X-Men: Apocalypse, and that he'll be played by Ben Hardy.
Hardy, a former EastEnders star, was cast a while back, but his character name was withheld. But as the latest X-Men movie gets closer to production in Montreal, speculation has abounded for weeks that he would be playing Angel, a winged mutant who was one of the original X-Men, so Empire got on the phone with Singer and asked him for confirmation.
“Ben Hardy is Angel – I shall confirm it for you!” said Singer. “But he’s not a very nice Angel! And that’s all I’ll say…”
And, as if to back that up, this piece of exclusive concept art shows Angel in two guises – with wings furled and then unfurled. And those wings look less like feathers and more like daggers. Might we also be about to meet Archangel?
If you haven’t read an X-Men comic before, allow us to explain: Apocalypse (played by Oscar Isaac) is a super-powerful mutant supported by the Horsemen, four artificially augmented mutants whose duty it is to do their master’s bidding. Perhaps the most famous Horseman of them all is Warren Worthington III, who was transformed from the blond, blue-eyed Angel into Death, aka the blue-skinned Archangel, complete with knives for wings.
So, does this fate lie in store for Ben Hardy’s Angel? We’ll find out for sure when X-Men: Apocalypse, which reunites the First Class/Days Of Future Past gang of James McAvoy’s Professor X, Michael Fassbender’s Magneto, Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique and Nicholas Hoult’s Beast, along with newcomers Hardy, Isaac, Tye Sheridan as Cyclops, Sophie Turner as Jean Grey, Alexandra Shipp as Storm and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Nightcrawler, opens next year.
And for more world exclusive concept art and insight into the movie from Singer and writer/producer Simon Kinberg, pick up the next issue of Empire when it hits newsstands on April 30.
**X-Men: Apocalypse **is out on May 19, 2016.