James McAvoy on X-MEN future as Professor X: “Do we come back? I don’t know.”

James McAvoy opened up to MTV News (via ComicBook.com) about his future as Charles Xavier, considering Disney’s upcoming acquisition of 20th Century Fox this year and Marvel Studios looming takeover of the X-Men film franchise.

“I love playing Charles. But you’ve got to write something interesting for you to do as an actor, you can’t just keep doing the same thing again and again and again,” he said. “So it may be time for somebody else to come in. Marvel and Disney are very smart and they’ve done this excellently. They seem to be on the verge of doing something new with just regards to the X-Men anyway, which is exciting, I’m excited to see that. Can the X-Men fold into the Avengers world? Essentially it’s the Avengers world we’re talking about. I don’t know.”

Further commenting on the situation, McAvoy made note of him fulfilling his contract, which he, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult renegotiated for DARK PHOENIX after completing their original 3-picture deal which concluded with X-MEN: APOCALYPSE.

“Do we come back? I don’t know. We’re all out of contract, so we don’t have to,” McAvoy said. “And I don’t know — they might not ask us to. But if they did and there was something interesting to do, I’m sure we would, and if they don’t, it’s been a good ten years.”

Stars Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Alexandra Shipp, and Kodi Smit-McPhee still have one film left in their contracts, even though Marvel may choose to do a complete reboot for X-Men’s introduction into the MCU.

“One of the beautiful things about the X-Men — and one of the things that always strikes me when the fans talk to you about it, is the reason that they love it — is because it has a parallel with [the] disenfranchised, with people that have been ghettoized, with ethnic minorities, with sexual minorities, with any kind of person that mainstream society is scared of,” McAvoy said. “There are large amounts of [them], they get pushed down, pushed off to the sides of society, and that’s what the mutants represent. They’re not the same necessarily as the handful of heroes that are regarded as demigods in the [MCU] — at times, of course, they’re fallen from that demigod composition as well.

“So if you fold them in, does that then get rid of that social commentary? And that thing where people who are immigrants into your country and are vilified for it can identify with mutants, people who have a different sexual preference and are vilified and scared and hide away because of it, they can identify with it. People who have a different ethnic minority and they’re vilified because mainstream society is scared of anything that’s different, they can identify with mutants.

“Do you get rid of that parallel? Or are Marvel and Disney just so smart they’ve figured out a way to do it and keep it all? Because they seem to be really clever at it.”

We’ll see what the future holds after the final Fox X-MEN films Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants release.

Source: MTV News (transcribed by ComicBook.com )