Jessica Chastain never knew her ‘X-Men’ character’s name: “What’s happening?”
Over the past 15 years, Jessica Chastain has become one of Hollywood’s most fascinating performers. She has starred in complex, challenging indies, big-budget thrillers, and several honest-to-goodness blockbusters, always bringing something compellingly left-of-centre to any role. Her choices have led her to three Academy Award nominations, including one win, but she hasn’t been without the occasional questionable selection.
Take, for example, when she signed up to play a villain in the comic book extravaganza Dark Phoenix. While that doesn’t sound like the worst choice for an actor these days – after all, most actors have found themselves in a cape and tights at some point – the fact that she didn’t even know her character’s name until she watched the finished film is the reddest of all red flags.
In fact, Chastain later recalled to People magazine that she reacted to finally discovering she played the disappointingly monikered ‘Vuk’ with a lot of confused head-bobbing and a bemused, “What’s happening?!” How did this happen on a major Hollywood blockbuster, though? Sure, even the most detached audience member probably knows that big movies go through a lot of changes from script to screen, but a major actor not knowing the name of the main antagonist she played? That sounds absurd, even by Hollywood’s wonky standards.
Unfortunately for Chastain, though, by agreeing to star in Dark Phoenix, she was unwittingly signing herself up for one of the most troubled blockbuster productions of recent years. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, it truly feels like the movie was doomed from the get-go, given the circumstances surrounding its creation.
The chaos that left Jessica Chastain confused on Dark Phoenix
You see, Dark Phoenix was the 12th and, to date, final instalment in Fox’s X-Men series, which hit the ground running in 2000 with Bryan Singer’s seminal original film. That movie, all black leather and hard sci-fi, changed superhero movies forever. However, the series suffered dramatically from diminishing returns as it went along, not helped by the concurrent rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. By the time Dark Phoenix was released, the cold reality was that interest in the franchise had dwindled hugely.
It was a follow-up to 2016’s lukewarmly received X-Men: Apocalypse and effectively remade large portions of the story from 2006’s widely lambasted X-Men: The Last Stand. These were not good omens to begin with, but still, Fox ploughed ahead with reimagining ‘The Dark Phoenix Saga,’ one of the most beloved Marvel Comics storylines of all time.
In the comics, this saga took the X-Men into space for the first time, so it only made sense when it was announced that Chastain was in talks to play Empress Lilandra of the Shi’ar Empire, an alien character who was integral to the original storyline. When it was announced that she’d officially signed up, though, no character name was given, and a month later, the Zero Dark Thirty star revealed she wasn’t, in fact, playing Lilandra.
Throughout production, the true identity of Chastain’s character was endlessly debated among fans, leading to the mother of all anticlimaxes when the movie finally came out. Comic book obsessives – who seemed like the only ones who actually went to see the film – were horrified to discover Chastain wasn’t even playing an important character from the source material at all. Instead, she played Vuk, an anonymous white-haired mystery woman who was revealed to be the leader of a shape-changing race of aliens known as the D’Bari. Even to die-hard fans, the D’Bari was a deep cut, as they are barely a tiny part of the ‘Dark Phoenix Saga’ in the comics.
Hiring such a famous actress to play a truly no-name character had already aroused fan suspicion that something drastic had gone down on the Dark Phoenix set, but this was officially confirmed when the story broke that the film endured reshoots that changed the third act almost entirely. These changes altered Chastain’s role from leader of the green-skinned, shapeshifting Skrulls to the much less well-known D’Bari. In truth, it made so much more sense for Chastain to play a Skrull, as that alien race has been an integral part of Marvel Comics lore for decades. It all begged the question: if the Skrulls were writer/director Simon Kinberg’s original intention, why was Chastain relegated to playing such a non-entity?
Well, it turned out that Marvel’s blockbuster Captain Marvel movie with Brie Larson was using the shapeshifting Skrulls, and that film’s third act bore a striking resemblance to what had been shot for Dark Phoenix. Given that it was made by Fox, which licensed Marvel’s merry mutants, and not by Marvel Studios properly, Dark Phoenix was forced to make changes, not Captain Marvel.
The whole debacle led to Chastain spending the entire film with shifting sands under her feet, and she admitted, “My character changed a lot. Which is an interesting thing, because I’m not playing someone from the comics, so it was almost like every day trying to figure out, ‘Who am I?'”
Then, when reshoots were ordered, her character altered significantly again, leading to the farcical situation in which she wasn’t even named on-set. “It was a constant evolution, which I guess in some sense is like theatre,” Chastain reasoned, choosing to be much more diplomatic about the situation than most stars would be. “It always moves, it’s never really done.”
