May 21, 2024

XMF / the SUPER

Celebrating X-Men Films And Beyond

Kevin Bacon on Hellfire Club leader Sebastian Shaw.

Moviefone has a new interview with X-MEN: FIRST CLASS star Kevin Bacon, who plays Hellfire Club leader Sebastian Shaw. The actor goes into detail about how his character is portrayed in the film and says the youth cast and story elements are “really exciting.”

Below are some select quotes, but click here to read the full thing, which thankfully, is pretty long:

“You don’t see much [Sebastian Shaw’s backstory] in the movie, but he’s kind of a self-made man. He lost his father as a young man, made his first million by the time he was 30 and first billion by time he was 40. He’s a very powerful billionaire and also, as it turns out, a mutant. He’s the leader of the Hellfire Club, which is a nightclub for the rich and extremely powerful. And he has a plot to take over the world, so that’s really fun. He’s incredibly good at manipulating people and at taking whatever kind of energy or ability they have and using it to his advantage, like if he’s talking to a German, he’s fluent in German. He’s very charming and able to get whatever he wants.”

On the cast…

“I think the youth of the movie, that is really exciting. You’ve got Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique) and ZoΓ« Kravitz (Angel) and James McAvoy (Professor Xavier) and all these young actors who are about to explode. When you see them become what we know of as the X-Men, to me, that’s really cool. The visual stuff, I can’t say, until I’ve seen the effects. But from a plot standpoint, watching the creation of that kind of elite squad and yet they’re all in this college dorm room kind of atmosphere, where there’s romances and drunken parties and people become friends and then they have a falling out. I think all that stuff is going to be really cool. All of these movies deliver something other than just another airplane blowing up because there’s interesting stuff going on between the characters.”