November 23, 2024

XMF • the SUPER

Celebrating The Continuing Legacy Of X-Men Films • Covering Our Most-Anticipated Genre Film And TV Projects

Olivia Munn on exploring Psylocke and keeping her outfit comic book accurate.

Psylocke actress Olivia Munn deserves some praise for ‘telling it like it is’ when designers tried adapting her character’s look for X-MEN: APOCALYPSE. Plans were originally set for her costume to be jet black, but she insisted that “It has to be purple…” and gave everyone on set, including director Bryan Singer, some background information on her character. “I felt like I had to basically pitch her,” she told Cinema Blend on the film’s set. “You have to do her justice.”

Describing her character, Munn said she’s “methodical and very loyal and she’s very calm and she’s fearless. Her aggression is below the surface, but it’s like, it’s bubbling … It’s right there at any moment to access. She’s a very calm, easygoing, kind of person within this world of insanity, but she’s so powerful and strong.”

On casting Psylocke for the film, producer/writer Simon Kinberg told JoBlo that Munn was originally up for an unspecified role in DEADPOOL that didn’t quite fit.

“Psylocke was quite a late addition to the script and the movie, he said. “Bryan Singer and I were up here in Montreal and we felt like we needed a different Horseman, and we just started going through the cycling of the different Apocalypse Horseman over history. We felt like we wanted it to be a female character and we pretty quickly settled on Psylocke. And super randomly I think a week or two earlier I was in Los Angeles and we were casting Deadpool. I had met with Olivia Munn for a character in Deadpool that ultimately wasn’t the right character for her, but we were like ‘We’ve gotta keep in touch, she has to do something in the X-Men world.’ And Bryan and I were sitting in Montreal a few weeks later and saying we should do Psylocke and I was like, ‘Dude, I just met with Olivia Munn two weeks ago. She’d be great.’ Then we looked at pictures of her online and I emailed her and I said, ‘I think this is a great character for you’ and she immediately emailed me back and sent me all this fan art online that fans had done of her as Psylocke. So that’s how that one came to be.”

Psylocke’s telekinesis will be on full display, while her telepathic abilities are put on the back-burner due to time constraints. “In the movie, we see her being a telekinetic,” she confirmed. We don’t see her being telepathic. It’s a decision because this is the first time we’ve really been able to see the character of Psylocke and have her really, truly exist in the movie.”

That will be something to explore in the future, assuming she makes it out of “Apocalypse alive. If she does, Munn already has ideas for her own spin-off film.

“If Psylocke had the chance to tell her story, it would be great to start with the genesis. We jump in the days right before all of her family is taken out and we have an understanding of what she had to lose, then her figuring out her powers and how powerful she is.”

Sources: Cinema Blend, JoBlo

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