Another week, another brace of X-Men: First Class posters from the film's official Facebook page. But if you’re one of the stars of the film and your name is not James McAvoy or Michael Fassbender, don’t excitedly peek below at our gallery to see if you’ve made the cut and your phizog is peering out from the images – it’s strictly still Professor X and Magneto’s game for now.
The X-marketing team seem dedicated to firmly lodging the idea of Charles Xavier (McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr (Fassbender) as young men destined to become the Prof and his helmeted nemesis. Though we have to admit that we still prefer the earlier, reflected images. By quite a margin. Seriously.
Fassbender, meanwhile, discussed his approach to playing Lehnsherr with The Onion yesterday (via Collider). When asked about how he tackled playing a broad superhero character, the actor explained his thinking: “You have to go for it. If you’re caught in a middle ground, you’re lost. Like you say, if you put on a helmet, you kind of have to go for it. That’s just part of those sort of fantasy things. If you’re not going to go for it, then you can’t expect the audience to go along with you. So you just have to commit to it.”
As for the character itself, he offered up a take on what he needed to bring to it: “Definitely the character has got to be coming from somewhere and has to want to go somewhere, and all the characters have an objective, and then it just depends on how determined they are to get that objective, and what sort of moral things they’re willing to bend, and within that, that’s where you get the interesting things. With Magneto, there is a very specific history that’s happened to him in the comic books, which is pretty heavy. So you use all of that, and then their moral standpoint is formed from their history and their environment.”
X-Men: First Class is out on May 30.