James McAvoy wants to explore Charles Xavier’s psyche in X-Men: First Class sequel.

io9 recently spoke with X-MEN: FIRST CLASS star James McAvoy who opened up about the developing sequel and where he sees Charles Xavier in the next chapter.

On the importance of giving Charles Xavier an interesting role:

I don’t know where we find Erik — it’s kind of defined at the end of the film that he’s a bad guy. I can’t really speak for him, but I know that with Charles, you either have to write him out of the movie or give him an interesting story. He can’t just become the guy that we saw in the first three movies. He just had two major things happen to him. He’s lost his best friend, essentially, and he’s just been paralyzed from the waist down. Which is just a huge, huge blow to his considerable ego. So he’s got to deal with that.

On exploring the psyche of Xavier after losing the ability to walk:

And I don’t think he can just brush over that and go, “yeah I’m in a wheelchair now,” because Professor X is in a wheelchair. You’ve got to deal with that, I don’t care if he’s a superhero and has brain powers or not, he’s just had a huge part of his physical life taken away from him, by someone he cares about more than anyone else. So he’s got to deal with that. That’s part of the interesting ideas that we’re talking about with Matthew [Vaughn], that Matthew’s very excited about which I think is fantastic, but I can’t really get into them with you because they may (or may not) form the spine of the story.

On making a sequel for the right, creative reasons:

I would definitely like to be in the sequel, but the truth as well that I’m bound to be in the sequel by a contract that says we do three films. So if Fox decides we’re doing it, then I don’t have a choice. But I would still like to, I had a great time with Matthew and Michael, that was a great threesome to work with and really sort of carve out a new beginning for those two characters. So hopefully we’ll have the same kind of joy on the set. The good thing is, I don’t think Fox is rushing into it just because it did well. They want to make sure they get a good script, because if you can’t get a good story there’s no point in doing it. It can be a stand-alone film if we can’t figure out a good story.

On director Matthew Vaughn pitching his sequel idea to Fox:

That’s what Matthew is talking about, he’s come up with a particularly interesting idea, last time I spoke with him. So he’s pitching that to Fox, and they’ve basically just got to write the script.

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