With Bryan Singer once more taking charge of the social media awareness and general announcements about the continuing X-Men franchise, the news is starting to flow. Yesterday, he put up some production concept art for the film and today brought the latest piece of the casting puzzle, as Kodi Smit-McPhee has joined the film to play the younger version of Kurt Wagner, AKA Nightcrawler.
[Excited to welcome @kodismitmcphee to the cast of #XmenApocalypse as young #Nightcrawler. @alexvaughanphoto](https://instagram.com/p/zOpm_oRD08/)
A photo posted by Bryan Singer (@bryanjaysinger) on Feb 17, 2015 at 8:21pm PST
The haunted, teleporting character, who was last portrayed by Alan Cumming in 2003’s** X2**, will show up in the film and likely prove to be of help when Xavier, Magneto, Mystique and the rest have to face down the powerful mutant Apocalypse, to be played by Oscar Isaac.
With the new film set in the 1980s, the** First Class** crew – James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult – will be joined by younger versions of Storm, Cyclops and Jean Grey, played by Alexandra Shipp, Tye Sheridan and Sophie Turner respectively, alongside returning First Class veteran Rose Byrne as Moira MacTaggert. Smit-McPhee, last seen in Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, should be able to bring something new to the character, although it’ll be interesting to see where we find Nightcrawler in this parallel timeline. And this will be Smit-McPhee's first official time in the X-Men universe: he was nearly young James/Logan in X-Men Origins: Wolverine but dropped out due to a scheduling clash with The Road.
X-Men: Apocalypse is scheduled to start shooting in April in Montreal. The film will be out in the UK on May 19, 2016.